And so here is the completed version of Book One, with all four seasons in one convenient microwaveable morsel, just heat & eat. With Peet’s Major Dickson blend, of course. For some reason I think Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon will take you where you need to go as you read this one, but if you lean towards country try out Lainey Wilson’s latest, Whirlwind. And I really don’t know why, but I finished out Winter while listening to a fairly obscure work from 1951, Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings (with Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello), featuring Benny Goodman on the clarinet, and the 2024 remaster is now on Apple Music.
So here she be, two of the final five characters in TimeShadow you haven’t met yet. The first three seasons ended up at 70 or so pages but as I worked on Winter heavy revisions were made on the first three seasons so you may need to revisit those if you run into inconsistencies. The final version ended up at 177 pages, so this one will take a few cups of coffee.
Have fun.
The Seasons of Man
Book One: The Aviator
- Spring
For as long as he could remember, the boy had relied on his oldest sister for almost everything. Her name was, Claire, and she was the good sister.
Because she was definitely not the bad sister. That was Ann. Ann was the bad one. The evil sister, if you are given to believing in such things as good and evil, for this is a tale of good and evil. Good where you expect to find goodness, and evil, of course, where you least expect it.
Ann had tried to smother the boy once upon a time, when he was very small, and those helpless moments of infinite suffocating stillness had formed his earliest, and most vivid memory. Trying to breathe while she pressed his face down into a sofa cushion, laughing all the while, before Claire came into the room and pushed Ann away. Then Ann was screaming and crying, because the evil inside Ann knew the sound of her distress would bring their father running. And he could just barely remember Ann telling their father that Claire had been trying to kill him, and that, for some reason, didn’t make sense to him, because his father believed the lie Ann had told him. He always did, too, whenever Ann did something like that. And then their father would punish Claire, yet somehow he was always punishing Claire for the things Ann had done. That Ann did and always got away with.
And while the boy grew to love his sister Claire, it took many years for him to fully understand the toll exacted on her. To the boy she seemed a resolute paragon of strength and virtue, and he never sensed the hard, brittle edges of the damage done to her.
And yet for years and years the boy wondered why Claire had bruises on her legs and arms, and it took years and years for him to understand that his sister Ann enjoyed what she had done to them all. And to understand the enormity of the injustice done by his father, with his belt out as he towered over the little girl trying to hide in the shadows of her bedroom. And the enormity of the injustice Ann was prepared to visit on all their futures.
He would go to Claire’s room and find her under the sunny window under the dormer, to her favorite spot just inside the protective shade of the pecan tree outside her window, and she would take him and hold onto him so protectively. And yet, he never understood why she clung to him so possessively. So fiercely, with her eyes so full of vacant fear.
Later, when he was older, when he did something wrong, even before he could fess up to it Claire would come and take the blame. She had taken on the role of his protector and couldn’t shake loose of her sense of duty to him, even when she knew the consequences were dire.
She seemed destined to remain his protector until she took her last breath, and one day he asked her why she did.
“I have to, you see? I have to stop you from falling…you, and the flowers.”
“What flowers?” He asked, because he didn’t understand.
Some nights the boy could hear his father in Ann’s room. Speaking in low, familiar tones that somehow seemed all wrong. Years later the boy understood, or at least he thought he did. At first he thought his father had been seducing Ann, but it was only much later that he finally understood the seduction had been the other way around. It took the boy that long to understand that some people are born evil, that this person’s moral universe does not align with goodness. That some are born with an innate understanding of human weakness, and an understanding of how easy it is to exploit that weakness.
So Ann was gifted in seduction and manipulation – yet oddly enough in little else, and in time even those gifts would betray her, as they would betray them all.
Yet Claire was gifted in ways few people could understand. In ways Ann never would, and in ways none of them ever expected.
For, you see, Claire understood music. The gift, if you will, of what lies both within and beyond music. And she was tempted to give this gift to her little brother.
The piano came to her as easily as breathing does to most, and her face could not be pressed into a cushion long enough, nor her arms bruised enough, to smother that understanding. Not even Ann could take her gift away, though she tried hard enough. Yet, and herein lies a conundrum of the human condition, their father was understanding enough to see that Claire possessed such a gift, and with this understanding he did all he could to help his daughter gain mastery. Because she needed his kind of help, the help only a decent father can provide, and even her father could see and feel and understand her need. Yet, even as the boy grew, this human conundrum took flight, as Ann and their mother became a kind of warped team. Because it seemed as though their job was to destroy Claire, and then the boy. Claire and her music, the boy and his dreams. It became a kind of spirited game for them. Birds of a feather, you might say.
The boy wasn’t particularly bright in those days, not like Claire was, but he was persistent. He’d liked to draw even as a toddler, and that was about all his teachers thought he had in the Smarts Department. He was always drawing, from pre-school through the earliest grades in elementary school. The usual stuff, too: airplanes and, naturally enough, space ships, because science fiction movies were all the rage and all the other boys in school watched that kind of stuff. But then he got interested in drawing houses. Houses he’d never seen. Houses so intricately complex that even his teachers began noticing that something more than a little unusual was going on with this boy.
‘Where do you come up with all these ideas?’ the boy’s teachers asked.
“I don’t know. I just see things.”
‘I see them in my mind, like they are a memory,’ he wanted to say – but he already knew better. Knew better than to tell these grown-ups such things, because he already understood that succeeding in school meant conforming to the narrow expectations of his teachers. And, anyway, those August Spirits would have never understood.
But when Claire asked him about a particularly detailed drawing one day, he told her.
And he wasn’t so very surprised when Claire said she understood.
Because she had her own memories, of places she had never been, and she went there too. Usually when their father was home.
So it turned out they both had places to run. Because in the end it really wasn’t safe in their father’s house.
What Claire called the House of Pain, and later the House of Death.
+++++
Maybe it wasn’t really his fault.
He came home from the war and no one recognized him.
William Tennyson had always been the life of the party. The high school quarterback, the good looking guy who always brought the cutest girl to the dance. And though he was popular he was also smart as hell. A real Ivy League kind of smart, very good at math and the sciences, and all his teachers just knew he was really something special. Yes, Bill Tennyson was going places; everyone was sure of that.
While most boys his age were content to drink on weekends, Bill Tennyson could not be bothered. While a few caroused around with a different girls on Saturday nights, Tennyson seemed to prefer the company of just one girl, a very bright, and very religious girl by the name of Doris Sawyer. Her father was a Methodist minister, and both father and daughter were frail, nervous creatures prone to fits of overzealous evangelizing. So while Bill and Doris were an item, the mature, reasonable kids that all the other parents liked to dote on, there was a kind of elemental inconsistency about the relationship.
His life was grounded in numbers, in science, while her’s drifted in and out of mysticism, caught up in the web of the internal contradictions of her beliefs.
So it was something of a surprise to Doris and all their friends when, after everyone graduated from high school and the gang set off to USC or Claremont, that Bill Tennyson got on a train and went east, to Princeton. To study physics. Doris of course went to a Methodist university down in Dallas, ostensibly to study English literature and the Good Book, but those who knew her best knew she was more likely going to look for fresh meat. She had matured into a young woman of almost surreal beauty, but there was something quite unattractive lurking under the surface of her Patrician features.
Princeton was as different from California as Bill Tennyson had hoped. There were no subtle racisms and class distinctions, nor were parochial attitudes in fashion, and because of current events, there was a sense that the world stood on the precipice of something horrendous. Europe was falling into the labyrinth once again, but so too was Japan, while many at home simply chose to look away.
And for the first time in his life, Bill Tennyson wasn’t the smartest kid on campus. He was, in a sense, one among many, yet even so a handful of Tennyson’s more observant professors took note of his keen sense of curiosity, something deeper that his quiet, studious nature often obscured. Yet he was even here a kind of Golden Boy, still the quarterback but now he was more the blond haired and blue eyed All American jock. Girls in town took note of him, yet he remained curiously uninterested.
All this came to a head in the summer of 1940, when the Luftwaffe appeared high over the English Channel. When the despair of the Great Depression, which had for a time given way to a fashionably virulent isolationism, finally took note of the disastrous events unfolding in Europe and Japan. Now, as a result of rumors emanating from Copenhagen and Heidelberg, big ideas were brewing deep within the scientific community at Princeton.
And so, soon enough and as William Tennyson’s luck would have it, the All American kid came to the attention of a peculiar, rather otherworldly old man. The old man was a Jew, and a recent émigré from Germany who had only just become an American citizen. An older man, and a physicist of some modest repute. His name was Albert Einstein, and the old man promptly cast a spell on Tennyson.
Under Einstein’s tutelage Tennyson continued as a graduate student at Princeton, but he soon departed for mysterious places with names like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. The boy became so deeply enmeshed in the universe of numbers that the true dimensions of the universe began to fade away.
+++++
Not one of Bill Tennyson’s friends knew what he had done during the war, only that when he returned home after Japan’s surrender, he came home wearing the uniform of a full colonel in the Army Air Force, complete with the wings of a pilot. He came home a pale, gaunt shadow of his former self, and while he never spoke of his experiences during the war, he tended to drink now, and much more than was considered fashionable. He usually drank scotch whisky, and often before five in the afternoon.
They also noted that their old friend was working for an aircraft company that had just opened a massive new plant in Burbank, and this company was also constructing a truly huge facility up in the desert, on an ancient, dry lake lakebed. Yet no one really knew anything about what Bill was working on, because no one who worked for that company ever talked about what they did.
So of course people were beginning to talk.
From time to time all the old gang got together and the boys cooked steaks on grills in their backyards and the same girls made their salads and side dishes and everyone talked about the good old days before the war, and yet even then Tennyson was tight-lipped about what went on in Burbank or up there in the desert. He did, however, drink more than his fair share of scotch whisky, which caused his old friends to talk behind his back.
And it was at one of those infrequent backyard get-togethers that Doris Sawyer waltzed in and everyone ooh’ed and ah’ed as she sashayed through her moment of victory, because she looked just like she did in all those motion pictures she was making over in Hollywood.
And though William Tennyson had seen not even one of her movies, he could not ignore the look in her eyes.
Oh, those eyes.
+++++
The boy pulled the sheets up over his head and tried to make himself small, something he always did when he heard his parents yelling at each other. Something he did most nights these days, but he knew that soon the worst would be over. His dad would threaten to leave again, and his mom would say something like “Go ahead! Just see if I care…” And then he would hear his dad storming down the stairs on his way out to his car, then tires screeching as his father backed out of the garage and down the driveway. Tires screeching and then the shaking would begin, because for a few minutes his mother would laugh – until she began crying. Then he could hear her on the telephone and a little while later he’d watch from his window as she went out the front door and walked out to the street and got in a car with someone. And it was always the same car, a Jaguar. A little convertible sports car. Silver colored, and with a tiny light that came on when she opened the door and climbed in. When he saw the same man. An actor, a famous one.
His father returned a few hours later and he usually went straight to Ann’s room, and a couple of times he heard funny noises coming from behind the closed door to her little room. Claire would poke her head out of the doorway to her room and tell him to go back to his room, and even then he knew she was trying to protect him. But from what? He did not understand such things.
But he remembered one night for the rest of his life, even though he didn’t find out what happened until the next morning.
Because his mom didn’t come home, not like she usually did. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and nobody was making breakfast. Because she had died in a car accident that night, somewhere out on Sunset Boulevard near a place called Malibu, but he didn’t know that yet.
His father came to school later that morning and he was called to the principal’s office.
Everyone was so worried for him, and that felt strange as he’d been scared to death – because being called to the principal’s office usually meant you’d been caught doing something very wrong. And he grew even more worried because in his experience the only person who’d ever cared about him was Claire, and she wasn’t there in the office. But his dad was, and that scared him more than anything else. And that was when he learned about what had happened to his mother.
And a few days later he’d been dressed up in a black suit, his very first, and he went to his very first funeral, too. His dad’s friends came, and a whole bunch of people his mom had worked with came, and while the boy thought he understood what the word death meant, he didn’t, not really, not until he saw her shiny casket being lowered into the earth. His dad was crying, and Claire was too. Yet Ann wasn’t, and at first he’d wondered why. She’d had an odd little smile on her face, and a kind of meanness in her eyes that he just couldn’t understand. No, he never understood that at all, though he never forgot that moment.
+++++
It seemed, for a while, that throwing himself into his work was the answer.
He had been tasked, during the war, with helping engineers at Boeing understand the theoretical dynamics of an atomic detonation, and how to ready the B-29 to stand up to the effects of the blast. But the deeper the team got into the problem it seemed that more and certainly more complicated issues arose. What was the optimal IP for the bomb run, what about the best speeds and altitudes for the drop? And egress? High altitude, or low? How would these effects change at various yields? Yet no one knew, not exactly, just how big the reaction would be, how effective the bomb would be. Dozens of physicists in New Jersey and Illinois were scrambling to come up with a meaningful set of parameters, but Tennyson knew that, at this point in the project, these questions were being reduced to a series of very educated guesses. Hell, it hadn’t even been known how far along the Germans were, or even if Roosevelt would use the weapon to hit Berlin first, then Japan, so balancing pressure waves and spar deflections had almost seemed premature.
And now, fifteen years later, he was still at it. The blast effects of the latest warheads, the big hydrogen devices, had barely been factored into the wing designs of Boeing’s first two jet-powered bombers, the B-47 and the much larger B-52. Further complicating matters, the B-52 had been designed as a high altitude delivery system, but now the Air Force was testing them at high speeds and at altitudes low enough to burn the ass off a prairie dog.
Tennyson was also teaching at Cal-Tech, while also working at Edwards Air Force Base on projects Blue Band and Quick Clip, the first real efforts to address the accelerated stress fractures and general wing fatigue that high-speed, low altitude flight produced. And just as the latest hydrogen warheads were entering service, further complicating his team’s calculations.
As these things so often are, what Bill Tennyson was not doing was attend to his children. He found it convenient to move from Beverly Hills to Pasadena so he could get to campus without fighting traffic, and Claire was old enough to notice the change in their new neighborhood. And Tennyson soon lost touch with his old circle of friends again, and within a year of becoming a widower he entrusted his kid’s upbringing to a series of English or Scottish nannies, each vetted by the FBI because of the nature of his work.
He drank more, at least until his drinking became a security risk, and then he turned to pills. Uppers and downers, reds and whites. Whatever got the job done. He never understood the trauma his wildly swinging moods left on his kids, especially Claire, but then again he just didn’t think of them very much at all. His work was simply too important.
In order to fully appreciate the nature of that beast, it must be said that he’d gone through flight training in 1943, earned his wings, and had even flown three missions in early ’45 – testing the first modified B-29s. In the late 1950s he qualified in the Buff, or the B-52, and flew training hops over the pole from Spokane to England – again, testing their latest wing modifications.
William Tennyson viewed his children as something of an accident, as needy little creatures he’d neither wanted nor needed. He viewed humanity as doomed and had convinced himself that bringing children into this world was an exercise in cruelty, and sometimes he even believed that was true. The women he met confirmed his bleak assessment of humanity’s future; each seemed like hyper-manipulative head-hunters, hedonists looking for a free ride and a consequence-free life along their way to endless money. Nannies came into the children’s lives and, while nice enough, most just wanted a year in sunny Southern California before moving back to the UK. Most dreaded working for Tennyson after just a few weeks, and all felt terrible for his children. Few were emotionally nurturing enough to make a difference.
Yet all the while, Claire continued her studies with the piano. At one point, when she was seven, she began writing music, and word of her abilities soon spread. Not merely gifted, her work was evaluated by musicologists and concert pianists, then famous conductors looked them over. One piece, a modest piano concerto, was recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, yet through it all Claire remained quite grounded. Her most cherished role remained looking after her little brother, still protecting him from their sister Ann.
One evening she was sitting at the piano in the little den off the main living room, and little Bill was – as was most often the case – sitting on a small sofa across from her, lost within an impressionist’s landscape of shadows as she played the Clair de lune, which was his favorite piece of music by far. She played the piece slowly that night, oh so slowly, and it seemed she had never played with such restrained passion, or with such anguish, and he wondered why even as he fell into that place her music always took him. The Clair de lune always left him adrift, like he was floating in some ethereal place, a place not quite real, yet not quite unreal, either. It was like, for a moment, he existed in this someplace else, like he was falling through time.
“It feels like I’m in a field of flowers, Claire,” he told her once.
And she had nodded, because she had seen them too. “Flowers in autumn, in the moonlight,” she told him then. “Just before winter. Before the snow comes for them.”
Because even then, if only inside her music, they would come for him and take him to a safe place to sleep. To the sleep only her music gave them. Safe, because Ann couldn’t get to them while they were safe in their hidden sleep. Safe, because even their father couldn’t find them while they were hidden away there.
Yet Claire knew the way.
In fact, the dream was remarkably consistent. As he fell away within the phrasing of her music, as the soaring epiphany of Debussy’s resolution arrived, in this dream he woke inside a landscape of searing white, white like the surface of the brightest moon, and Claire was always at his side, holding his hand. Her music was still beckoning him on, even though there was no piano in this place.
And within moments of their arrival, the two were surrounded by what looked like giant pink butterflies, only these butterflies had faces. Human faces, or almost human. The eyes were different. They had owls eyes, golden-amber eyes, and small beaks where a nose might be. The butterflies gathered ‘round, hovering and inquisitive, and the first time they arrived it was as if the butterflies were not quite sure if the boy and the girl were real. The light there was so bright it hurt, the glare so uncomfortable he had to shade his eyes with his cupped hand, yet the air was comfortably cool, and gentle breezes caressed his face. Then the butterflies would come closer still. Air from the gentle motion of their wings came as Claire’s music had, but then he looked away and was soon adrift in the familiar warmth of his bed. His room was dark but for the light of a full moon, yet he really wasn’t in his bed and he wasn’t really in his room. No, just now one of the butterflies was next to him – oh, she was so close now – and it felt like her mind was inside his. She was wordlessly asking questions and he was answering, too, as wordlessly. Why were they here, she was asking? How had they come?
And he couldn’t understand the questions, or where the words were coming from, let alone the answers she sought. After all, this was a dream and dreams weren’t real, yet this didn’t feel like a dream, or even look like the dreams he usually had. And certainly didn’t feel the way his other dreams usually felt.
Then he saw Claire. She was there right beside him, and she was dressed just as she had been a moment ago, while she sat at the piano.
So this couldn’t be a dream, could it?
But Claire didn’t look surprised, and that was what he remembered most after that first time. That look in her eyes. The look that said she had been here before, and somehow he understood that the weird butterfly people were her friends. They wanted to be his friends, too.
And that scared the hell out of the little boy.
+++++
Bill Tennyson started flying again soon after the move to Pasadena, “to save time flying up to the desert,” or so he said. He purchased a Bonanza and later a new Baron, a 56TC fully equipped for instrument flight. Pressurized cabin, four seats, very fast. He kept the airplane at Hollywood Burbank, and as his boy was getting old enough, and his legs long enough to reach the rudder pedals, he started teaching Bill Jr. how to fly.
But he soon noticed the boy seemed distracted all the time, like he just couldn’t concentrate. Though the boy almost seemed interested in flying, when his son was at the controls he seemed to daydream and quickly lost situational awareness. And he realized with some sadness that his son was a stranger.
Then the two of them flew over to the Grand Canyon one Saturday morning, and Bill Sr. flew them down into the canyon, following the course of the river for a while before climbing back up above the south rim and turning for the airport just south of the big National Park hotels there. He landed and then rented a car and they drove to the El Tovar Lodge, and they had lunch overlooking the vast canyon just beyond the glass.
Bill studied his son as they looked over the menu. He seemed bright enough, often even inquisitive enough to be a good student, yet his grades were poor, and all his teachers said he seemed distracted. Like he was daydreaming as he drew. some kind of alternate reality. Sometimes that reality seemed to have exquisite detail, so much detail it was alarming. They recommended counseling, and of course, treatment.
“What did you think of the canyon?” Tennyson asked his son.
But the boy shrugged off the question and looked away, off beyond the dining room.
“Bill, what are you thinking about?” he asked.
And again, the boy shrugged. “Nothing,” he did finally manage to say.
“No one thinks of nothing, Bill. Why won’t you talk to me?”
His son turned and looked at him. “Because we’re afraid of you.”
The words stung, and Tennyson looked out the window for a moment. “Could I ask why?”
“Why? You mean you don’t know?”
He looked at his son again, repulsed by the sight of the loathing he felt in his boy’s eyes. “No, I don’t know. In fact, I don’t understand anything about you.”
“How could you? You’re never around, and when you are you’re drinking and you get mean. So we hide, we disappear. Even Carrie knows enough to hide when you start drinking.”
Carrie was their latest nannie. Nannies had recently tended to last just a few months before fleeing in despair.
“Because of my drinking? You hide because of my drinking…?”
“That, and the things you do with Ann.”
Bill looked away, acutely embarrassed. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
His son looked away again, and though he didn’t like where this talk was going his father had started it. “Claire and I, we see you when you get on top of her. We hear the things you say to her.”
Tennyson stood abruptly and left the table, leaving his son alone with not another word said. He returned to the table a few minutes later to find his boy staring out the window, crying.
“Would you like to go live with your grandmother?” he said after he sat.
“No, not really. Not unless Claire could come with me, anyway.”
“All three of you. Together.”
“Then no. Not if Ann comes. Nothing would change.”
“What do you mean, Bill?”
“She twists everything, Dad. She makes everything bad.”
“How do you mean?”
So he listened as his son talked about how Ann did bad things and then blamed Claire. Or about how she set up him and then blamed Claire. He was specific. He told his father everything, and the weight of his words began to crush his father.
So Tennyson asked the waiter to bring him a scotch and water.
“That’s what you do, Dad. You start drinking that stuff and then you get mean. That’s when we hide. But I don’t have anywhere to hide here,” his son said quietly. “I just want to…”
“Where would you go, Bill? If you could go anywhere you wanted, where would you go?”
“Claire and I go there all the time. It’s safe there.”
“What? Where do you go?”
“I don’t know where it is, but we go there a lot. We have friends there, too.”
“I don’t understand. You don’t know where this place is? How far away is it? How do you get there?”
But his son just shrugged. “I think they found us. Or…they found Claire, anyway. She takes us there, with music.”
“What do you mean?”
“She plays a certain song and we go there.”
“She plays a song? You mean on the piano?”
“Yes.”
Tennyson was now convinced his son had experienced a psychotic break, but could two people experience the same events? Could they share a delusion? He didn’t remember enough psychology to discount such a thing, but his gut told him that, while it might be possible, such a shared event would be unlikely. His son was either making this up or something strange was happening, and he tried to remember if there was a psychologist available at work when he had a sudden thought.
“Bill, do you think Claire could take me there, too?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“You said you have friends there? Who are they?”
“I don’t know.” There was no evasiveness, no looking away.
“They don’t have names?”
“No. They don’t talk, either, but I hear their thoughts.”
Tennyson looked at his unfinished lunch, which suddenly looked very unappetizing. His son’s food was untouched. “You want to spend the night here, or you want to fly home?”
“I’d like to walk around here, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, let’s do that.” Tennyson paid the bill and they walked out to the pathway that ran along the rim overlooking the canyon, and soon both regretted not having heavier coats handy. “Damn, it sure has gotten colder,” he said as they walked along. His son pointed to the deep blue clouds advancing over north rim, and they saw lightning flicker there, and several seconds later heard the deep, rumbling thunder of colliding air masses.
“It probably won’t be safe to fly, Dad.”
“Glad I reserved a room. What say we try and go find a store that sells coats!” His son looked up at him and smiled.
“Might be a good idea. I think it might snow.”
The pinks and greens of the north rim disappeared behind white veils of slanting rain, and the air turned much colder as they walked along. More lightning, then the thunder grew closer, the warning wind blowing through the stunted piñon pines along the rim. They ducked into the old Lookout Studio perched right along the rim just as the first squall hit, and watched as the storm settled over the lodge, tall pines hissing and swaying all around them. A sudden sharp crack, lightning crashing down nearby, hair standing on end…
When the front had moved through, they walked back to the lodge in heavy snow and made their way to the fireplace under the massive timber rotunda.
“Well, that was interesting,” Tennyson’s son said.
“Interesting?”
“Yes. The colors, and the sounds. And especially the trees, the way they sound in the wind, because it almost seems like they were talking to each other.”
“The trees? Talking to each other?”
His son nodded his head. “Yes. Couldn’t you hear them?”
“I heard the wind in the trees, yes.”
“I think that’s how they talk to each other. And maybe they use different scents.”
“Interesting. How’d you come up with that idea?”
His son shrugged. “I don’t know. It seems like they need to talk, and maybe that’s how they do it.”
“They need to talk?”
“Sure. Everyone needs to talk.”
“So, trees are like people? They need to talk?”
“They’re alive, aren’t they? And maybe they get afraid too, like when storms come.”
“Were you afraid?”
“No, I think it’s kind of exciting.”
“When I was your age, I thought so too. There’s something almost magical about storms.” He paused and looked into the fireplace and, as he always was, he stared, almost mesmerized by the glowing embers under the flaming logs. “But you’re afraid of me? Right?”
His son nodded his head, and this time he didn’t look away.
“Do you think you could ever not be afraid of me?”
“No,” his son said, “never.”
“Mind if I ask why?” Tennyson said, but he was unsettled by the sudden, icy contempt he saw hiding behind the lonely boy’s eyes.
+++++
Tennyson had been assigned to Project Silverplate in August of 1943, just days after it was formally authorized, and for the next two years he shuttled endlessly between the Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren, Virginia, to the labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, as well as the engineering offices at Boeing in Seattle, Washington. As time passed, he spent more and more time at the Boeing B-29’s production facility located at the Martin Aircraft plant at Offut Field, just south of Omaha, Nebraska.
Initially assigned to work on strengthening the -29’s wings, he soon determined that the original wing’s structure could handle any loads from the blast waves of an aircraft flying above 20,000 feet. The physical size of the first two bombs, however, dictated major redesigns of the aircraft’s bomb bay and release mechanisms, while the safeties required to arm the weapons were also proving troublesome.
Two years later, flying 31,000 over southwest Japan, Tennyson crouched between the co-pilot and flight engineers’ seats in the Necessary Evil, one of three B-29s flying that first mission, photographing the fused air-burst 1,600 feet above Hiroshima. A film crew recorded the event just a few meters away, and the blast effects were minimal so high above the city. It was a Monday morning at 8:15, and Tennyson looked down on the city of 345,000 as his B-29 flew in a loose formation beside the Enola Gay; he blinked and turned away as the image of that blinding flash seared itself into memory. He had no way of knowing that 70,000 human beings had passed in that instant, and that over the next several years more than twice that number would die from the effects of radiation and indirect blast damage – but he’d had the presence of mind to take several images of both the blast and the Enola Gay’s structural reactions in the seconds after, so in the end he’d considered the day modestly productive. He never considered the moral implications of the mission.
Perhaps that was naive.
+++++
Tennyson and his son returned to Burbank, and to their home in Pasadena, the next day, and once again his son seemed only modestly interested in flying the aircraft. The Baron has an immensely strong airframe, and has an unusually stout wing assembly. Taking note of little Bill’s apparent boredom as they flew above the Mojave, Tennyson gently pushed the nose over and advanced the throttles, and when the Baron’s airspeed hit 180 knots indicated he applied heavy right aileron – and held the yoke hard over until the Baron was flying inverted.
His son screamed – not with terror but with pure joy – and Tennyson rolled out and pushed the nose over…until they were flying above Palm Springs, California so low that the police were called by several alarmed homeowners. Then back on the yoke and back up into the clouds, the G forces so heavy his son could hardly move his arms. Tennyson slalomed between puffy white cumulus clouds, then slammed into a few and he could see the goosebumps form on his son’s forearms as icy cold mist coursed through the little aluminum air vents on the overhead panel. They flew over their house in Pasadena before settling down and landing in Burbank, and by the time the dust settled that afternoon little Bill was certain he wanted to be a pilot, too.
Just like his dad.
Just like his dad.
+++++
Bill Jr., just like his sisters, attended to the Chandler School before moving on to San Marino High School. He was the only freshman in high school with a pilot’s license, and when his senior year began he was a certified flight instructor, or CFI. And he had his own airplane, a ten year old Beech Bonanza that his father gave him on his sixteenth birthday, and soon he spent most of his free time giving lessons to friends. In the process he built hours and hours of flight time, and when anyone bothered to ask what he wanted to do after college all Bill Jr would say was “Fly.”
Just like his dad.
Claire had, on the other hand, disappeared deeper and deeper within her music, and she visited the butterfly people whenever they called out to her. Bill, however, began to distrust them, to distrust their very existence. To do so, he had to doubt his perception, the very nature of the world he’d known and thought he understood, but there soon came a time when he was no longer able to believe all that had ever happened. If he’d asked himself when that happened, he might have admitted that his trip to the Grand Canyon marked his turning away. And, he had to admit, the Grand Canyon had become something like his spiritual center, if he’d been willing to admit that there was indeed something like a spiritual existence.
But while the canyon always seemed to pull at him, he never once considered why.
When he first started his formal pilot training, he did his very first solo cross country flight from Hollywood-Burbank to the little airport near the South Rim, where he’d first flown with his father. When, a few years later, he flew with friends he usually took them there, dipping down low and flying along the course of the Colorado River before landing at the same airstrip. Claire had, by his last year of high school, been studying music on a more formal level, first in Boston and then in New York, so one Thanksgiving he flew all the way across the country to celebrate the occasion with her at their grandmother’s place on Martha’s Vineyard.
No one was very surprised when Bill Jr was appointed to Annapolis, nor were they caught off-guard when he went to Pensacola to earn his wings. The family came to Florida for his graduation, and for the celebration that followed, and while Bill Jr wasn’t so surprised by the way his sister Ann hung on his father’s arm, he was dismayed to find that Claire looked emaciated, almost skeletal, and her skin appeared almost yellow in some places and gray in others. He danced with both his sisters to the subdued music of a piano trio at a local country club, resplendent in his Service Dress White uniform, and when he held Claire she seemed little more than a wraith in his hands. His father beamed, so proud of his son that it almost hurt, as ever completely unaware of the lingering damage done to his firstborn.
A year later Bill Jr reported for duty aboard the USS Constellation, the carrier’s air wing then carrying out strikes and air superiority missions over North Vietnam. Two months later, Bill Sr received a telegram from the Secretary of the Navy informing him that his son had been shot down and was presumed killed.
The truth of the matter was somewhat less clear.
II. Summer
A gray and green Lockheed C-141 touched down at Travis Air Force Base late in the afternoon, and as the lumbering jet taxied to the ramp William Tennyson watched impassively, just behind his two daughters. They stood just behind a low chainlink fence, noting that a hearse and several ambulances were waiting nearby, not quite out of sight. The aircraft’s massive wings, mounted on top of the chunky fuselage, drooped precariously, all four turbojet engines barely spooling as her pilots steered her to a stop. The rear clamshell doors parted silently and a massive gray cargo ramp lowered to the concrete ramp. The hearse from a nearby funeral home was summoned, then one of the ambulances; moments later corpsmen walked down beside the first of five stretchers, loading the first of the just released, and very ill, POWs into one of the waiting transports.
At the same time, an air-stair on the jet’s left side opened and uniformed men walked out into the late afternoon sun, many shielding their eyes as they turned and looked for the gallery of waiting families just a few hundred yards away. But first the ambulatory men had to run a gauntlet of political dignitaries, then wade through a canyon of network television crews, and only then did the mostly Air Force and Navy airmen reach their waiting families.
Bill Tennyson Jr was in this second group, and when his sisters started waving frantically, Bill Sr looked at the line of men expecting to see a motley collection of stunted scarecrows, yet he was surprised to see that his son, his boy, looked remarkably healthy, if a little underfed. Indeed, many of the men looked to be, on the surface, anyway, reasonably fit. This was, however, the third, and final, repatriation flight, and this group had been held in captivity the shortest length of time. Still, Bill Jr had been at the Hanoi Hilton for more than a year.
The men, most of them aviators, had already been debriefed in the Philippines, and most had been “interrogated” by shadowy figures from one of the intelligence agencies, mainly to collect information on their treatment while in captivity. Some had needed emergent medical care, some just needed vitamins and antibiotics. All needed to see their families.
Bill Jr saw Claire first, and the first thing that went through his mind was that she looked far worse than most of the men on the airplane. Haunted, dark circles under her eyes, clothing that looked three sizes too big, and with her hair a frizzy mess he wondered what had happened to her while he was away. Ann looked like Ann, with her psychopaths darting eyes and faintly mocking smile still plain to see. Yet his father looked the most out of sorts, like time had worked a number on him. Or Ann had.
When he got close Claire ran into his arms and most of the families around them thought they must be husband and wife, but no, they soon saw that such was not the case. Claire was sobbing as she held onto her brother, and Bill ran his fingers through her hair and held her close. He watched as Ann looked at them, the same undercurrent of anger and jealousy in her eyes that he’d always seen. His father, however, wiped a tear from his cheek as he looked at his children – then their eyes met.
This was a moment of quiet understanding between men. His father’s eyes asked if he was okay; Bill smiled and nodded with his eyes, and that was all it took. After the formalities were over Bill Sr drove his family into San Francisco; they spent several days in the city before returning to Pasadena and they talked about everything and anything but the war. Claire was teaching at USC, Ann was working for a bank in New York City. His father was still teaching at Caltech, still working at Edwards Air Force Base, only now he was a one star General in the Air Force Reserve. He had briefly given up flying after receiving the telegram notifying him of his son’s death, only to start again when he learned his boy was alive. He was also currently working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on something he called the Deep Space Network, but he didn’t care to elaborate. Bill Jr shocked his father when he announced he was planning on spending at least five more years in the Navy, perhaps more, but his father wisely just nodded and smiled.
He and Claire had walked around one afternoon while in San Francisco, spending time at Fisherman’s Wharf and Golden Gate Park, and while she talked Bill watched her closely. Especially her hands. She clinched her fingers up into a ball, usually when she talked of Ann or their father but sometimes when she talked about feeling alone, lost and alone, when she’d learned of his death. And how she’d almost felt reborn when she learned he was still alive.
She spoke in quiet, hushed tones, however, when she spoke of visiting the butterfly people.
“They told me you were alive,” she told him in a sudden rush of words, “but I didn’t believe them. The Navy wouldn’t have sent that telegram if they weren’t sure, but then they took me there…”
“They took you…where?”
“To your cell, at that POW camp.”
He’d stopped walking, looked around to see if anyone might have heard her, then turned to look at her. “You’re know how I feel about this, right?” he’d said with a scowl.
“I had to know if it was true,” she sighed.
“And you didn’t say anything to Dad?”
She shook her head. “You know I never talk to him about that.”
He relaxed a little, and turned to resume walking. “What else did they show you?”
“The night you were shot down. Taken prisoner. What happened to you after that,” she said quietly. “Colonel Thao. What he did to you, to all of you.”
He stiffened but nodded. “He’s evil. I always hoped that somehow we’d bomb the camp, that he’d be killed. It didn’t matter if I got killed. Only that the bastard died in the most painful way imaginable.”
“I know. They showed me some of the things he did.”
“To me?”
“Yes. And to a few of the others. And some of the guards you talked to.”
“They weren’t all bad, I guess. A few of the guards were almost nice, but we never knew if they were running a ‘good cop, bad cop’ op on us. Pretty soon we started communicating with each other in code and we figured out who the real bad actors were.”
“But Thao was the worst,” she said. “I sensed that. Why are you going to stay in the navy?”
“Because I like the life. Being at sea. Flying. Serving my country.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t look well, Claire. What’s going on?”
“The places they take me. The things I’ve seen.”
“Such as?”
“Stuff that hasn’t happened yet, Bill. Bad things. Bad people.”
“They’re letting you see…ahead?” he said, aghast at the very idea.
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Don’t tell anyone what you see, okay? Not even me.”
“You know I won’t. But…they were curious. They want to talk to you.”
He stiffened. “About what?”
“About what happened to you over there. They don’t understand.”
“I don’t trust them, Claire. I wish you weren’t so open to them.”
“Bill, I’m going to move here, to the City. There are others here. Others like us. I want to be close to them…”
“It’s dangerous, Claire. Who knows what their motives really are?”
“They just want to understand us better.”
He shook his head, looked away. “That’s what bothers me.”
“Don’t be paranoid…”
“Did you somehow forget what I do for a living? You know, like I drop bombs and kill people? Why would they want to know me better unless it’s to understand our capabilities.”
She sighed. “I don’t sense that, Bill.”
“What do you sense?”
She looked away, and her eyes became suddenly evasive. “Sometimes I think they’re judging us.”
“Oh, gee, and that’s supposed to be comforting?”
She shrugged.
“I guess they think Colonel Thao is a shining example of our humanity…”
She grinned. “Maybe.” She turned and stared into his eyes, smiling again. “Or maybe they think you are.”
He had to smile at that, too. “Oh, man, if that’s the case then we really are in knee-deep shit.”
“Where are you going from here?” she asked.
“Whidbey Island, I think.”
“That’s where you were before, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. More of the same.”
“Then what? Back out to another carrier?”
“Maybe. In the debrief they told me they’d like me to go through instructors training, start training pilots new to the Intruder.”
“But Bill, the war’s over…”
“This one is.” His voice was flat, his meaning clear.
A shiver ran down her spine. “Is that all we are? Moving from one war to the next?”
“In the end, maybe it is. The old saying they keep drilling into our head is ‘someone always wants to take your stuff.’ Either someone stops that from happening or, well, I guess you know the rest.”
“Someone always wants your stuff. Wow. That’s one way to look at us.”
He nodded. “Maybe not the most flattering portrait of humanity, but I think it’s proven to be pretty accurate. But that’s what evolution means, kiddo. We evolve or, well, we don’t. If we don’t, I guess we disappear. I’d rather that didn’t happen to us, you know?”
“So, you keep flying…for how long? What comes after that?”
“Oh, you know, work for an airline, or run guns to South American revolutionaries.”
“You do know you’re lucky to be alive, right?”
He nodded. “It took some flying,” he sighed. “Wings shot all to hell, my BN bleeding out faster than our hydraulic fluid, two in the morning in a thunderstorm.”
“Did you really crash?”
“No, not really. I got the gears down and put her down on the first thing that looked long and straight. Turned out to be an unpaved road. Tore off a wing, big fire. I pulled my BN out just before fire hit the cockpit, and about that time it started raining police. They were pretty mad, too. I pulled a pack of Camels from my BNs flight suit and they mellowed down a little, at least until one of Colonel Thao’s goons showed up. Then the night turned kinda dicey.”
“You’re beginning to sound more and more like Dad.”
“Fuck. You’re kidding, right…?”
She shook her head. “Just don’t marry an actress and you’ll be okay.”
“Me? Marriage? I don’t think so…”
“Oh, you’ll get married, and soon.”
“Why? What makes you say that?”
“Well, you signed up for the War Corps, not the Peace Corps, and you sure didn’t sign up to become a priest…”
“How do you know I’m not, you know, a homo?”
“You? No way.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “I had to clean out your room after Dad got the telegram. Your collection of girlie magazines is safe, by the way. I boxed ‘em up and got them up to the attic before anyone found them.”
“Whew, thanks.”
“See, you ain’t gay, bucko.”
“Gay?”
“That’s what they’re calling homosexuals these days.”
He shook his head. “You know, there were girls in Annapolis, townies I mean, but it felt like I hardly ever left campus. Especially not the first two years.”
“I know. I got your letters.”
“Anyway, sneaking a Playboy onto campus was like grounds for expulsion, and I was either studying or shining brass til three in the morning and never had time…”
“You’re still good at changing the subject, Billy.”
“Please don’t call me that…”
She smiled. “I will if you’ll talk about girls and getting married.”
He smirked and then feigned anger but Claire wasn’t buying it. “I doubt Whidbey Island is a hotbed of action, Claire…”
“You never know…?”
“Yeah, I do know. I spent eight months there, remember?”
“So, call Pan Am or TWA, get a real job…”
“Actually, I need more time in jets. Like fifteen-hundred, two thousand hours more, maybe a lot more…”
“With your background? Seriously? Have you tried?”
“I haven’t really been in a position to do that lately, and besides, do you know how many pilots are hitting the job market right now? Just about everyone coming home is cashing out, hitting the private sector, and the Navy isn’t exactly clamoring for new pilots right now, either.”
“But they asked you to be an instructor, right? Why, Bill?”
He shrugged.
“Because you’re a good pilot, Bill. That’s why.”
“I’m sure you’re trying to make a point here, but I’m not quite sure what that is.”
“Oh come off it. The Navy represents the safe choice, Bill, and it also means you can put off looking for a girl a little longer…”
“Why are you so sure that getting married is the be-all of human existence? I mean, I don’t see any rings on your fingers…”
“C’mon, Bill, I’m not date-bait now and I never will be. You and Ann got Mom’s looks, and I look like I wandered out of Auschwitz…”
“You do not…”
“Yes, I do. Don’t be patronizing, Bill. Not to me, okay?”
“You’ll find somebody, Claire.”
“Okay. If you say so. More to the point, though…”
“I hear you.”
“Did you sign the re-enlistment papers yet?”
“No. No, they told me to think about it for a few weeks.”
“So, I’ll move up here to the city and then you can get a job flying out of San Francisco. We’ll bunk-out together, at least until you get your act together – and get yourself a wife…”
“You have a job up here, or what?” he asked, ignoring her last jab.
“Yup,” she said with a curt nod. “A teaching gig, a couple of offers from recording studios, maybe some concert work. I like it up here, Bill, and I’m really beginning to detest LA.”
“I always saw you ending up in Boston. You seemed happy there.”
“Because I was. But just getting away from Dad and Ann…that’s what really…it felt like a big weight was lifted from my soul, ya know?”
He nodded. “She’s not getting any better, I see.”
“She still has him wrapped around her little finger. Anything she wants, she gets. I think it’s called transactional psychopathy on the narcissistic personality spectrum.”
“Oh, swell,” he sighed. “So, if there’s a name for it, that must mean there are more just like her out there.”
“She’s a chameleon, Bill. Lots of psychopaths are. They show you what you want to see, tell you what you want to hear, because that’s how they understand the world. If they want something from you they watch and observe, find the chinks in your armor. Your weak spots, where you’re most vulnerable. Then they move in…”
“For the kill, don’t you mean? And let me see here, you want me to get married, right? No thanks, kiddo.”
“Your job is to find one of the good ones, Bill.”
“You make it sound like war, Claire. And I’ve had enough war…”
“Oh? And yet you want to sign up for five more years in the War Corps? Am I missing something, Bill?”
Both missed the Old Man walking behind them through the park.
+++++
Bill Sr flew his family back to Hollywood-Burbank the next day, yet the reality was that his son did most of the hands-on work. His son had not flown in almost two years, yet the still had the touch. The touch that defines a real pilot. Gentle, precise, confident. And though Bill Jrs approach was too fast and his landing hard, his father had to laugh.
“You do recall that this is not a carrier,” Bill Sr said as his Baron slammed down the numbers. “No tail hook, no arresting wires? No need to fly such a hot approach…”
“Oh yeah, sorry.”
“You’re going to have to get back into the groove, son. Every motion, remember…smooth…just like you got a handful of eggs.”
“Right, Dad.”
Bill Sr did the drive out to Pasadena, and he remained in a talkative mood. “You still playing golf?”
Claire rolled her eyes. “Uh, Dad, I don’t think they had many golf courses in Hanoi…”
Bill Sr rolled his eyes. “I know that! I was just wondering if he kept at it back in Maryland.”
His son scowled. “Not much time in school for that, Dad. Sorry.”
“You feel like trying your hand later this week?”
“Uh, with you?”
“Yes, with me!”
“Where?”
“The Annandale course.”
“They finally let you in, huh?”
His old man beamed. “Yup, took a while, and some serious arm twisting, too, but…”
“Yeah, Dad, I’d like that.”
Ann looked distressed, Claire bored while ‘the boys’ talked, but then Claire realized her father was driving to the country club. “We going there now?” she asked.
“Just for lunch. Thought it might be a nice way to slip back into city life…”
“Dad, all I’ve got are my khakis. I can’t go out dressed in my duty uniform.”
“I don’t think, given present circumstances, that anyone there is going to put you on report.”
“Yessir.”
It turned out that Bill Jrs ordeal had been a pretty big deal amongst the membership, and quite a few were on hand to welcome the aviator into their club. Even the girls were tolerated, just this once. As he was still technically in uniform, Junior refused alcohol and was more than happy to slam down real, honest-to-god Coca-Cola all during lunch, standing and greeting each member as they dropped by their table. More than a few wanted to play a round with him, and it seemed everyone wanted to know what he was going to do now that the war was technically over.
But William Tennyson, Jr., found the whole day slightly unsettling. Not even a week before he’d been rousted from his sleep and told to vacate his cell. A few hours later he was walking up the rear loading ramp into a C-141’s cavernous cargo hold, and someone mentioned this bird was called The Hanoi Taxi. A couple hours passed and he deplaned into the oppressive humidity of Subic Bay, in the Philippines, but not a day passed and his group was off to Pearl Harbor on the next leg of their journey home. Two stretcher-borne men were unloaded while Hanoi Taxi refueled, then the jet lumbered off to Travis AFB – and home.
But at the club, it wasn’t so much a case of culture shock as it was the complete lack of awareness among some of his father’s friends that there had actually been a real war going on. There’d been no rationing, no savings bonds or the image of Rosie The Riveter to drive it all home – as had been the case during the Second World War – and so hardly any reason at all for the country club set to pay attention to events in Vietnam…until he’d been shot down and reported KIA. Then it seemed only then had the war actually touched all their lives, and yet Bill Jr picked up an undercurrent of resentment from a few of these men. It was like they’d been perfectly content to ignore this war, like the sacrifices endured by so many actually meant very little to them, and his presence among them was not simply an unpleasant reminder, it was also an unwelcome repudiation of their comfortable ambivalence.
Claire picked up on the vibe, too. And so of course she had to comment.
“This war was different,” she sighed as she clasped his hand after an especially obsequious yet unmistakably snarky man his father’s age dropped by their table. All the fat man wanted to know was what Bill planned to do now that he was home. When Bill mentioned returning to the Navy the man had literally sneered before walking off, shaking his head in disbelief. She continued as they watched the fat man disappear: “There wasn’t a Pearl Harbor moment, just Walter Cronkite reading off body counts night after night before droning on about Kissinger’s latest failed attempts to get the North Vietnamese back to Paris.”
“To Paris?” he asked, clearly confused.
“The so-called peace talks were held there,” his father grumbled. “Damn shame. They never turned you boys loose to take it to them. We could’ve bombed them back to the Stone Age in one night, but neither Johnson nor Nixon had the balls for that. Instead, we sent fifty thousand young men to an early grave…”
Claire shook her head. “Dad, I think the North Vietnamese buried a few million of their people as a result of our involvement in their civil war…”
“Oh, Claire, don’t give me that Jane Fonda crap. That bitch was wrong to go over there, wrong to get involved when our boys were fighting there.”
“Dad,” Claire continued, “I think she was trying to stop our boys from being killed.”
“Yeah? Well, she’s nothing more than a useful idiot. Another commie-useful idiot.”
Claire turned to her brother. “Sure you don’t want something stronger?” she asked as she downed her third Bloody Mary. “God, I hate this place,” she muttered under her breath.
They played four rounds of golf over the next week, the first two in a wheezing Cushman golf cart, the next two on foot, and oddly enough Bill Jr found himself enjoying the exercise immensely, despite the overwhelming smog in the air. He talked to the retention officer up at Whidbey Island NAS a couple of times, between talks with TWAs personnel office at their flight academy outside of Kansas City. They wanted to fly him out for an interview, and both Claire and his father were ecstatic. Ann scowled then hopped on her broomstick and returned to New Jack City.
So he went to Kansas to have a look around, and a line captain showed him their new simulator facilities, including one of the first full-motion simulators in the world. After two days at the facility they offered him a position: First Officer (trainee) on the brand new L-1011. The whole situation was too good to be true, and everyone at the academy knew it. Yet they gave him 24 hours to accept or decline the offer, and the patient old line captain explained the facts of life to Bill – off the record, of course – which went something like: “You do know that if you decline the offer you’ll never get another chance at TWA.” And, oddly enough, that clinched the deal for Tennyson. Not only was the money good, but the routes he’d get to fly sounded interesting – especially after his life behind bars in Hanoi.
Flying the L-1011, the captain told him, would mean being based in New York and flying to either London, Paris, or Frankfurt, and possibly Rome and Athens in the near future. On a personal level, the job also meant a serious salary with one of the best airlines in the world. He’d be in training for months and if he washed out he wouldn’t be able to crawl back to the Navy, but the stress of flight instruction had never been a problem for him before.
So, he sat in the parking lot outside the flight academy for a few minutes, mulling over his options, and his future, then went back in and signed on the dotted line. The next class started in three weeks and never once looked back.
Because looking back wasn’t in his nature.
With his future out of the way, he flew up to Seattle and signed all the relevant paperwork and was as suddenly a civilian again. Yet…when the reality of that moment actually hit him, he felt almost lost – and maybe even a little alone – for perhaps ten minutes.
+++++
And, perhaps not coincidentally, the dream started that night, during his last night in Seattle.
As sleep came he was soon back in his cell. The smallest details were present, like unwelcome visitors from the darkest recesses of memory: the tiniest slit of a window high up on the beige brick wall. Thick iron bars rusting on the ends, the blue-grey paint turning mottled red. The gray paint on the iron door peeling, the damp concrete floors slick with blue-green mildew that felt like cold snot. A single lightbulb dangling from a long cord in a round caged enclosure suspended from the dank timbered ceiling high overhead, the light too high to reach – so casting too little light to see the cockroaches in the shadows. A sleeping mat rolled up on the floor in one corner, an old wood bucket in another. Nothing else. No sink. No running water. No toilet but for the bucket, which if he behaved he would be allowed to empty – once a week.
As his dream came he looked around and began to cry. ’Nothing else but me in that hole. And I lived there for how many years?’
Wasted years. Years of pain, the isolation more painful than the pain Colonel Thao inflicted almost daily. Sadistic pain, pain with no purpose. And even in the dream he felt the pain.
But then she was there, in the cell beside him. The tall pink butterfly with the owl’s eyes.
Talking to him. Examining his wounds. Then treating him. Always the empathy and compassion of a friend.
The next morning after that happened the guards had been stunned by his appearance, and they wanted to know the how and the why of it, yet most of all the who. Who had treated him? Colonel Thao had been promptly summoned, another savage beating followed, and that time he was sure the bones around his left eye had fractured.
And that night she came to him again. She asked questions, she treated his wounds, and the next morning the exasperated guards summoned the colonel – again. Another savage beating – but this time the butterfly hovered unseen just above the colonel, and each bloody wound disappeared almost as soon as it was inflicted. The colonel and the guards were staring in mute disbelief, then they shrunk back against a wall, regarding him suspiciously – like he was something other than human.
Then the colonel began asking even more pointed questions.
“How you do this? This not normal…”
And then in the dream Thao takes out a machete and hacks off his arm, and all his tormenters jump back when his severed arm floats through the and reattaches itself. Then Thao hacks off his head, and he watches from within his own severed head as it rolls on the floor before it drifts back up and reattaches itself to his sundered neck. Thao pulls out a revolver and shoots him in the face, and the bullet bounces off his forehead and falls harmlessly to the damp floor. He looks at Colonel Thao, his eyes full of pity as he regards the poor man lost inside all his hatreds, then he looks up at the pink butterfly and smiles. She smiles back, and in his mind she tells him that he is learning well, that he is making good progress.
“What?” Bill Tennyson said as he woke up. “What did you say?”
“I asked if you were making progress, in your classwork?” his father said again. “You sounded kind of dejected on the phone.”
“Oh. I had a ding on my last check-ride.”
“Altitude hold again?”
Bill Jr nodded. When flying an instrument approach you have to hold your assigned altitude to within plus or minus fifty feet, and blowing past those limits was a major error, a ding. And it was three strikes and you’re out, too. “Yeah, but it was a simulator check so it didn’t count.”
“Everything counts on a check ride, son. Don’t you ever forget that.”
“I know, I know.”
“I hope you do. When’s your next hop with the examiner?”
“Friday.”
“You’re done with all your classwork? Exams all signed-off?”
“Yup.”
“Know your scores yet?”
He nodded. “No mistakes. One hundred percent. But turns out that’s normal here.”
“No surprise there. TWA has the best pilots in the industry. Any boys from the Navy in your class?”
“A few. Some Air Force pukes, too. A couple of civvies made the cut, and there’s crew training for Air Force One here, too.”
“Really? They’re training with you guys?”
“Same building. They’re using the new full motion 707 simulators. Well, like you said, TWA is the best.”
His father nodded as he carefully watched his boy. “You look tired. Sure you have time to grab dinner?”
“Yeah. There’s a decent place not far from here. Huge ribeyes. I mean like 40 ounces.”
“You’ve got to be kidding…”
“No sir, but I’m not sure who orders ‘em.”
“Fat slobs marching headlong to their early grave, that’s who…” his dad snarked.
‘An early grave…now why does that click?’ the little voice in his head asked. ‘Didn’t Thao say that to me once? That he was going to send me to an early grave…?”
Or had he said that in the dream?
They ending up at an old honky-tonk downtown that served pretty good barbecue: “Legendary!” proclaimed the hand-paintedmenu posted above the counter. He ordered a root beer and his old man drank iced tea, which was interesting even if he didn’t ask his dad about it. They talked the low-key talk of pilots, one-to-one, man-to-man and not the usual father son crap he dreaded, until then the subject of Claire came up.
“Apparently,” his father began, “she’s been seeing a shrink.” His father looked down at his hands and sighed. “Turns out she’s not doing too well.”
“What does that mean, Dad?”
“She, uh, apparently tried to take her own life.”
“What? When did this happen?”
“Last week. Saturday, actually. Apparently she, uh, took some pills, then called a friend to talk. Fortunately this friend called the paramedics.”
“Where was she?”
“Home. Her bedroom.”
“Where were you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“At the club.”
“And Ann?”
His dad looked away. “She was home, too.”
Bill Jr didn’t know what to say, but he felt his anger boiling over. “Dad, are you even aware of how Ann plays you. How she sets up Claire to take the fall, and how you always get sucked into her dramas?”
His father nodded his head, but he did not look up to meet his son’s eyes. Maybe he already knew what he’d find, but his son had had enough. “I need to fly home. Where is she, Dad?”
“No. You need to stay here. Finish what you’ve started. If you bail now you’ll be lucky to find a job flying cargo in Africa.”
“So, is this why you came? To tell me and then…”
Again, his father just nodded his head. “You finish here in ten days. Claire should be home by then, and…”
“Why was Ann home, Dad?”
“She had business downtown. She frequently does, you know, and she usually stays at the house.”
“I don’t want her around, Dad. Not when I’m there.”
“You hate her, don’t you?”
“Yeah, since the first time she tried to kill me.” Bill Jr suddenly felt ill, because now he wasn’t sure of his father’s reasons for being here. “You know, Dad, sure, you could say I hate her, but that really just barely scratches the surface.”
“She tried to kill you?”
“Oh come on, Dad…” Bill sighed, then he recounted all the times she tried, and finally spelled out his father’s role in enabling Ann’s schemes, and William Tennyson listened to it all, then stood and walked out to his rental car. Bill followed, and got in the passenger seat while his father fumbled about for the car keys.
“You want me to drive?” he finally asked his shaken father.
“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”
“You never listened, Dad. I don’t think you could hear us, because Ann’s always had you wrapped around her little finger. But the worst part was, or is, that you seem to like it that way. Claire and I learned not to talk about it a long time ago – because that only made things worse.”
“So, what, you two just suffered in silence? Was I that bad a father?”
“I can’t answer that one, Dad.”
“But I can. Right? Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
“More like I’m telling you to take a long look in the mirror, Dad. Ann is your poison. She’s been poisoning you all her life. To get what she wants, even if she doesn’t really know what she wants.”
“Just to control me. I’ve known that, I’ve always felt that coming from her.”
“And yet you played along, didn’t you?”
“I know you won’t understand this, son, but I never felt like I had any self control when I was around her. It’s like she has this power…over me. I can’t…I can’t resist her, Bill. I’ve thought of all the ways I might have, but when she comes at me all my resolve just disappears…”
“Is it sexual, Dad?”
His father stiffened but then, recognizing imminent defeat, he just wilted away and nodded. “Even when she was little, Bill, she knew all the right buttons to push, all the soft parts to exploit. I’ve…I’d never been around anyone like her.”
“Was Mom like that?”
His father shook his head. “She was manipulative, sure, but your mother was nothing like Ann. Ann is…”
“She’s evil, Dad.”
His father nodded. “Whatever happens, son, don’t ever trust her. It’ll look like she’s coming at you from one direction, and the next she’s coming at you from the other, usually from behind. And she knows how to hit you when you’re not looking.”
“What did she do to Claire this time, Dad?”
His father shrugged, then looked ahead – his eyes lost and alone. “I don’t know. Perhaps this doctor will get to the bottom of it.”
“Where’s Ann now?”
“Mexico City I think. The bank is opening a new branch there.”
“And so she’s still fucking her way to the top.”
His father turned to him and sighed. “Finish what you’ve started, Bill. What’s done is done. I’m going to try and put things right, between Claire and me. She was looking at a place up in The City, and I think I’ll go up and get that arranged.”
Bill shook his head knowingly, because in his father’s moral universe money always set things right. Screw up your daughter, buy her a house. Or a car, or a horse, or whatever else might purchase a clear conscience. No guilty conscience meant absolution with no lingering aftershocks. So QED, that problem solved. Call the pro at the club and set up a tee time for the next round. Move on. Never look back.
Like father like son.
+++++
The idea of living in the same city as Ann proved an insurmountable hurdle; he simply could not, so would not do it – yet he had a difficult time coming up with an excuse that the crew billeting people would swallow. When he explained his dilemma to Gene Jenkins, one of the captains he regularly flew with, the old timer recommended getting a place out on Long Island: “Easier commute and no need to go into the city, so no need to think about her.”
“But like…where?”
“Oh, there are some apartments near JFK, but you ought to try and rent a house. Prices are not to bad in Rosedale right now, and every now and then a duplex comes up over by Springfield Park. Nicer still if you don’t mind the commute, check out Oyster Bay up on the north shore. A little more money but a better investment, and I know a realtor up there if you want her number.” The old captain just grinned as he said that, but Tennyson didn’t catch that.
“Where’s it…uh, how bad is the drive from there?”
“Oh, I guess you could drive, but it’s easier to just get on the train. Crew shuttle stops at the station in Jamaica, and as you well know the shuttle brings you right to the lower level dispatch office.”
“Oh? That sounds interesting.”
“Might work for you, at least until they start using the L-10 on the Logan to Heathrow run. Give it a year and I bet that’ll be up and running.”
“You think I should put in for it?”
The old captain shrugged. “I like New York, and I like flying out of Kennedy. And my guess is they’ll start adding even more routes in a year or so. Chicago and the west coast feeding to our runs out of both Kennedy and Logan. You’re a Southern California native, aren’t you?”
Bill nodded. “Family in LA and San Francisco.”
“Pretty good chance you could get a slot out of SFO. My bet is LAX will be 7-4s and 707s for the time being, or, hell, you just might like JFK.”
“Never spent much time around Boston.”
“It’s nice – if you know where to go, but it can get pretty rough if you wind up in the wrong neighborhood. The Irish on the south side…man…you talk about mean…”
“Oh? You run into trouble there?”
“You could say that, but when I was your age I was pretty rowdy.”
Bill laughed, if only because it was hard to imagine Captain Jenkins ever being rowdy – or doing anything even remotely fun. After they landed at Kennedy, Jenkins gave him the realtors name and number, and the old man even asked if he could call ahead, let her know he’d be calling.
“Sure, thanks. The sooner I can get out of that hotel the better.”
“You’ll save some money, too. Always put some money away, out of every paycheck.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“And screw you. And, oh, I’ll do the ‘meet and greet’ while you handle the paperwork,” Jenkins said as he grumbled his way past the flight engineer and out to the forward door to chat with the deplaning first class passengers. ‘Everyone hates to do paperwork,’ Bill sighed. ‘Well, some things never change…’
+++++
His hotel was a short walk from the Long Island Railroad’s Jamaica Station, so he hopped on the train running all the way out to Oyster Bay, passing through the old monied villages of Glen Cove and Matinecock along the way. It was a gray day out and bitterly cold, while the greens of summer had given way to the reds and golds of October, yet these low clouds seemed oppressive, like a harbinger of all the slush and ice that loomed in the winter just ahead.
Soon the gated mansions gave way to more modest homes, then the village itself came into view. Colonial era houses and frugal fishermen’s homes now dotted the way ahead, and by the looks of many of the colonial houses they were the real thing. There were some Shingle Style mansions on the water visible in the distance, and big red brick ersatz colonial mansions dotted the closest shoreline. Then he saw a sandy beach on the left and a pond off to the right, even more modest homes and then boatyards and fishing boats resting in the harbor. The station itself was little more than a siding with bare platforms on both sides of the tracks, and as it was midday there was almost no one on the train so he was relieved to see a silver Mercedes 300D waiting for him in the station parking lot. As his train slowed to a noisy, jolting stop he saw a woman emerge from the sedan, and a rather handsome one at that. Rich. Cultured. And she looked bored as hell, even from a distance.
He stepped out of the warm train into the biting autumn wind coming in from the north, right off the white-capped waters on Long Island Sound, and right away he knew this place would be as cold as could be in just a month or two.
And Gloria Betancourt was as cold as could be, too, and she wasn’t going to wait for winter to let him know.
“You must be Bill,” she said, her voice dull, matter of fact yet pleasant – in a professional realtor kind of way. “Let’s get you in out of this chill, shall we?”
He went around and got her door and she seemed oddly annoyed by that, then he climbed in the right front as she handed him a slim file folder, with, he assumed, a few rental properties to look over.
“So, Bill, Eugene tells me you’re a First Officer, and that you’re flying with him from time to time?”
“Yes Ma’am,” he replied in his best navy ensign’s voice.
“I know your pay isn’t all that great right now, so why don’t you tell me what you can afford?”
That was direct, he said to himself, and the tone of her voice was not just a little condescending. “Oh, I don’t know, what do those big places on the water go for?” he said with a grin.
She smiled. “Homes here in the village are in the fifty to ninety thousand range. The houses out on The Neck and Centre Island are quite a bit more.”
“How much more?”
She squirmed in her seat, not sure if she wanted to put up with this much longer and wondering if one of the new associates in the office would take him off her hands, so she made some idle small talk while she wheeled the Mercedes through the village to her office. “Why don’t we go in and get some coffee, and I’ll have one of my associates go through the listing book with you while I make some calls.”
He nodded. “Fine. Lead the way!” He walked behind her, admired her shapely legs for a moment, until they reached the door to her office. Which was located in a little gray-shingled saltbox that had once been a house, neat and tidy, too, with a receptionist and a couple of girls his age on the phone. Gloria waited until one was free then introduced Bill to one of the girls, her name Liz Parker, who she described as “One of my bright stars!” Gloria added this with a knowing wink.
Bill sat and Gloria disappeared into an office, shutting the door behind her.
“So? What can I help you with, Bill?”
“How about you show me around town, take me to a few of the decent neighborhoods, show me things like libraries and parks, just things like that.”
“Okay. Sure, we can do that. You have a price range in mind?”
He shook his head. “No, not really. Just show me around, take me to a few neighborhoods you wouldn’t mind living in, show me the areas to steer clear of, that sort of thing.”
Liz was wearing a dress but, he had to admit, she looked like she was dressed a little out of character, like she was more at home in jeans and an old flannel shirt. He followed her out to her car, a mustard colored Ford Pinto, and he helped her in then went around and hopped into the car. He noted it was tidy and he tried not to watch her while she drove around town, pointing out the library on Main and then Roosevelt Park, “Because Teddy Roosevelt lived here!” then they drove past the high school.
“Wow, now that’s a monstrosity,” he said as he took in the massive red brick building.
“Oh,” she said, and he noted she sounded a little hurt by that, “why do you say that?”
“It’s a mesh-mash of incongruent styles. Gothic and neoclassical elements don’t complement each other, but the Tudor arches are over-the-top. It looks like the architect reached into his bag of styles and started randomly pulling out things…”
“Oh, are you an architect?”
“No, but I was really into it when I was a kid.”
“What do you do now?”
“I’m a pilot.”
“Oh? Like airliners, that kind of pilot?”
“Yes. I take it Gloria didn’t brief you?”
Liz laughed. “If Gloria thought you had any money at all she’d fly you to the moon and back. She figured you don’t, so here we are…”
“Do you have any listings of your own?”
“Me? Oh, just a couple.”
“Show me one.”
She laughed a little. “Okay. I’ve got a nice one, well, it needs some TLC but it’s still solid, right over here on Pearl,” she said as she flipped her turn signal and turned from Main onto Pearl.
“Now that’s an interesting building,” he said, pointing at the ornate Carpenter Gothic Revival building to his right.
“Oh yes, that’s First Presbyterian. I think the building is from the 1870s. And here’s my listing, right across the street.”
“Cute,” he said as she stopped and pointed to a gray two-story house. “Nice front porch. American Gothic. I like it. Can we see it?”
“It’s vacant, so sure…but it’s a hundred and ten thousand. Could you qualify for that?”
He nodded and shrugged at the same time, but then he turned and looked at her as he smiled. “You never can tell.”
“Okay, well, it’s on a lock-box so we can go right in if you want.”
“I want.”
“Okay.”
“So, tell me about it.”
“Uh…okay, right, well, we have three bedrooms up, two baths, one up and one down, and the kitchen has a great butler’s pantry. Great dining room, too. Really big with a great view of the back yard.”
“You said it needs some tender loving care? What’s wrong with it?”
“The hardwood floors, they’re in bad shape, and the kitchen needs an update. The appliances are pre-war, and the heating system is ancient. It’s an estate sale so the family might just want to take the money and run, if ya know what I mean?”
“You know the family…?”
She looked away. “Oh, everyone knows everyone around here, Bill. No one locks their doors. The mailman puts your mail inside the door if the weather’s bad. Kind of the way things used to be, I guess. At least that’s what everyone says.”
She seemed nervous as she walked up to the door and fiddled with the lock-box attached to the front door knob, and as he watched her shaky movements he wondered what was going on. “So. You went to high school here. What about college?”
She nodded. “Yale. Two years.”
“What did you think of it? College, I mean.”
She looked down, didn’t answer the question but opened the door and walked on in; then, without missing a beat she began walking through the living room to the kitchen, describing things in intimate detail as she walked him around and through the rooms, and she even pointed out a few of the special features.
The bedrooms were small, both bathrooms antiquated, and the kitchen was indeed in need of a total makeover, but Liz was correct about one thing: the bones of the house were solid and it was charming, and with a few judicious upgrades the house would make a solid investment.
Then once again she asked about his finances.
“You like movies?” he asked, and judging by her reaction the question must have felt kind of out of the blue. “I mean old movies, like from the 40s and 50s?”
“Oh, yeah. You mean like Casablanca and all those?”
He nodded. “Ever hear of Doris Sawyer?”
“Of course. Who hasn’t!”
He smiled. “Well, she was my mother.”
She wheeled around and looked at him. “No way!” she cried.
“Way,” he replied, smiling.
“Isn’t she the one who died…oh, uh, I’m sorry.”
“Not a problem. Anyway, she left us, her kids, money in a trust and my dad is like the world’s best at managing money, so the price of the house doesn’t bother me…”
She was growing wide-eyed as he spoke, then tears welled up in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he asked – just before she turned and ran out the back door and into the tree-lined backyard. He watched her standing out there, her arms crossed as she looked up into the pines, thinking it better to give her some space. So he turned and walked upstairs again and looked at the bathroom, in his mind drawing the perfect solution in the limited space afforded, then he looked at the biggest bedroom again. One tiny closet, and all three bedrooms shared that one tiny bathroom, as was customary in mid-19th-century homes. He could keep it as is or he could enlarge the bathroom and create two larger closets by eliminating the smallest bedroom, but as he walked around he found the proportions of the rooms kind of pleasing. They fit the house, and more importantly the character of the times, and in his mind it was better to preserve than to destroy.
She was waiting for him in the living room by the front door, and he could tell she had been crying…
“Sorry about that,” she said reflexively.
“Sorry…for what?”
“Look, I grew up in this house and I can’t afford to keep it and it’s just kind of hard to think of letting it go…”
“Been in your family a while?” he asked.
“Yup. My great-grandparents built it in 1878. My father grew up here, and me and my sister did too.”
“Why can’t you keep it? Your parents didn’t leave any other assets?”
She shook her head. “No. My mom ended up in a nursing home. I think that ate up all their money, and then some.”
“Debts to pay off, I take it?”
“Something like that, but look, ethically I’m not really even supposed to be showing this house to you. Technically it’s my listing, but Gloria should be showing it to you.”
“Will you get in trouble?”
She nodded. “I’m still kind of on probation, so yeah.”
“Okay. Why don’t we head back to the office and you tell her you drove me by the house and I’d like to see it. Maybe you can tell her about my mom and all that. Think she’d be interested?”
Liz smiled. “Are you, like, impulsive or something? You don’t even know the area, let alone what kind of people live around here…”
“People are pretty much the same wherever you go…”
She looked pensive, yet at the same time evasive before she spoke: “No, Bill, the people around here are different. Some are really different. You’ve got the locals, then you’ve got the people from the city who come out for the summer, or for a weekend, people like Gloria. They live in the big mansions and the live in all the little cottages around here, the rich and the little people who take care of the rich.”
“Yeah, like I said, people are people and that’s pretty much how things were where I grew up. Beverly Hills and Pasadena, and then there was Watts and South Central, so yeah, I know that story all too well.”
“Yeah, I guess maybe you do.” There was something in her eyes in that moment. Something he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but maybe it was vulnerability and loneliness. Yes, that described what he saw, or thought he saw, in her warm brown eyes.
“So, let’s go pull the wool over Miss Betancourt’s nose. Okay?” he said, trying to pull her out of her funk.
“Okay!” she agreed.
“And…one more thing.”
“Oh?”
“Could I take you out to dinner tonight?”
+++++
A week later he flew out to San Francisco after he got in from his latest trip to Heathrow. Claire was home. In her new home out beyond the Presidio. And she had called, asked him to come out because she was going shopping for a new piano and, she pleaded, she needed his help. He was dubious, but as soon as he cleared customs he grabbed a snack then ambled out the domestic concourse to catch the evening flight to SFO.
It was an oldish 707, the 320c variant with long legs, and as he wanted to sleep he declined the offer of a jumpseat and instead settled into a vacant seat in first class. He was still in uniform so quickly hung his company jacket up and slipped on a black cardigan, skipped the champagne and reclined his seat as soon as the gears were up. He woke up on short final, the strobes on the wingtips pulsing in low clouds as the jet descended in a light fog – which, he thought, was exactly how his jet-lagged brain felt. He looked at his watch. Ten minutes early. He nodded and shut his eyes and napped as the Boeing taxied to the gate. He waited until everyone up front was off then walked up the Jetway and sure enough…despite having told her not to, Claire was there waiting for him.
And this time she ran into his arms. Very upset. Very happy to see him. And maybe a little contrite for the whole psychiatric episode.
And she had come for him in the Porsche. His Porsche, actually, but he’d decided to keep it out here for now. She rarely drove but she just managed the car despite the stiff clutch, so she asked him to drive back into the city. Despite being tired he demurred and took off from the short term lot just outside the old Art Deco terminal building. He took the 101 through the city almost all the way to the Golden Gate, then turned south on Highway 1 before getting off for the last bit out to Sea Cliff, to her new house. The house the money from her third album had bought. It looked like an Italian Mediterranean villa perched high on a cliff 200 feet above Baker Beach to the right and Mile Rock Beach to the left, and, she said, when the fog was out you could just see the Golden Gate Bridge, which still looked red to her. She fixed coffee and they went out onto the patio and listened to the surf a few hundred below, somewhere down there in the night.
“Glad you could come,” she finally said.
“For a piano? Really?”
“Yes, but when you see it tomorrow you’ll understand. It’s terribly expensive, Bill, but the sound board is magnificent, and the tone…”
“You know, you describe a piano the way most people describe a ribeye steak…”
They both laughed at that. She’d grown up with a used Baldwin that had seen duty in a West Hollywood piano academy as well as a jazz joint on the Sunset strip. And it was still in Pasadena, in her father’s living room. Right where the damn thing belonged, she liked to say.
“I think I’ve found a very special instrument, Bill.” She looked hopeful, expectantly so.
“Claire, you could play a trashed upright and it would sound special…”
She took his arm and leaned into him. “I’ll never be able to marry, you know. I need you too much to let a husband come between us.”
“That’s for damn sure. So, when’s the last time you ate?”
“You mean food?” she said sarcastically. “I have no idea.”
“Okay. Off to the kitchen. It’s spaghetti and meatballs time, kiddo.”
+++++
They drove over to Golden Gate Park late the next morning, just a little before noon, really. Bill was jet lagged and the additional change from the east coast to the west wasn’t helping matters, yet he’d gotten up before her and fixed French toast and scrambled eggs, then squared away the kitchen before taking a hose and a chamois to his car. “I’ve never seen so much dust…and salt! My God…the amount of salt in the air must be incredible.”
“Everything corrodes up here really fast,” Claire said as she helped dry the 911’s sloped front bonnet. “It’s the surf.”
“Hell, this thing is going to rust out before I put five hundred miles on it.” He finished buffing out the chrome then popped off the Targa top, and when they’d cleaned up and redressed they drove through the park to Lincoln Way with the top off, enjoying the autumn warmth. When they passed Kezar Stadium she told him to start looking for a parking space. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“There,” she said, pointing to a low slung storefront, the building sage green and with big windows illuminating the showroom within. And the sea-blue sign above the windows said Rosenthal Music Company + Copenhagen + San Francisco.
+++++
There were the usual entry level instruments near the front of the piano showroom, and even one or two Steinways, but Claire led him to a smaller room located off a dark corner. Finished-up rather like the typical living room in an upscale home, complete with a sofa and two sumptuous lounge chairs, there was an ornate instrument in the cozy room, lit by two recessed can lights set to an easy on the eyes glow that made the room feel like late night. An old man was waiting for Claire in the room, and he smiled when he saw Bill, then came up and introduced himself.
“You must be the brother I keep hearing about. William, is it?”
“Bill,” he said, smiling.
“And I’m Saul. Saul Rosenthal.” The man spoke good English but did so with a rather thick Danish accent. He was dressed modestly but, Bill noted, with the cultured restraint of old money.
Then Bill turned and looked at the piano and he was simply overwhelmed at the intricate detail he saw. Each of the three legs was formed by standing herons made of cast bronze, but the other supporting details were straight out of fin-de-siècle Viennese coffee house architecture, a style that, while similar to Prairie Style elements actually predated Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie ornamentation by several decades. There were hints of verdigris in the bronze work, and so many different species of wood had been used that upon first sight the whole seemed overwhelmingly complex. Maybe too busy. But he stood back and reexamined the instrument from different angles and suddenly it all made sense, all the design elements came together…
“This is, I don’t quite have the words,” he whispered as he stepped closer and ran his fingertips lightly over the various surface textures. “It almost feels alive. Tantalizing, perhaps. Like she’s waiting for someone to come along and set her free.”
Claire smiled and nodded to Rosenthal. “See, I told you he would understand.”
Saul nodded appreciatively at Bill. “So you did,” he said wonderingly.
She turned to her brother. “It’s the only one, Bill. The only one of it’s kind.”
“Do I even want to know the price?” Bill asked as he went and ran his fingers along the keyboard. He knew Bösendorfers were pricey, literally usually twice the price of a Steinway, but the sheer production costs of this piece had to be beyond stratospheric.
“Probably not,” Claire sighed. “I just wanted to know what you think of it.”
“I’d say she’s worth the price on investment grounds alone,” he said, “but how does she sound?”
“Magical,” Rosenthal said, his eyes twinkling as if he alone was in on an inside joke.
“When can you deliver it,” Bill said more than asked.
“We can get everything ready by next Friday, and I’ve outlined steps you’ll want to take before we arrive and set it up.”
“Such as?”
“Humidity control, air filtration, and I’ll need to look over placement in the room as well. The acoustics of this instrument are demanding, and so the placement precise.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. She might sound flat if not placed just so, but I’ll know more after I examine the room.”
He turned to his sister. “Where did you want to put it, Claire?”
“That little alcove off the living room. The room with the view you like.”
He nodded as this little showroom was about the same size. “That ought to work. Sorry I can’t be here next weekend.”
“Oh?” Rosenthal said.
“Yes, sorry.”
“A pity,” the old man said. “Well, shall I go ahead with setting up the delivery?”
Claire looked at him, her eyes hopeful.
“Yes. Let’s do it.”
“Splendid,” Rosenthal said, leading them to his office. “Your sister explained that you handle all her business affairs. How nice to be so trusted.”
Bill shrugged off the compliment, taking the invoice from the old man’s hands as he sat. His eyes went round as he looked at the figure she’d been quoted. “This can’t be correct,” he said, his eyes now shifting to Rosenthal’s. “I can’t help but mention that I just purchased a house on the north shore of Long Island Sound for less than this. Is this the best you can do?”
Rosenthal smiled graciously and steepled his hands. “How about ten percent?”
“How ‘bout twenty,” Bill countered.
Rosenthal extended his hand, and Bill wondered how much lower he could have gone – but he could see that Claire had been mortified by his dickering. Which was, when all was said and done, why he was handing her affairs. He did the math in his head and wrote out the check and signed it, then handed it to the old man – who bowed smartly and slipped the check into a black leather wallet, and this went into a pocket inside his jacket.
“When will you be back in the city, Mister Tennyson?”
“I’ll see if my schedule allows something in three weeks.”
“I should very much like to see your reaction to the sound she produces.”
“I’m looking forward to that as well.”
As they left the shop Bill looked at his sister, at the smile on her face, for that was, in the end, what this had been all about.
Across the street an Old Man in a green loden cape smiled as well, then he tapped his ornate cane on the sidewalk twice and walked off into the park. Thunder rolled in there distance.
+++++
The dream that night was especially bad. Colonel Thao again, Thao and his hideous house of horrors. Thao, presiding so proudly, and so efficiently over the Hanoi Hilton. His prison camp, the misery he inflicted was his and his alone. He was the architect of misery. Misery made of blood and sweat as much as it was of brick and mortar.
Thao began again. The torturing. Pure evil, as relentless as it was pointless, as surely all evil must be. The beheadings, the astonished amazement as heads reattached, all of it endlessly repeating, forever looping over and over and over. Because in this dream, as in life, blood was never in short supply.
He woke and went to the kitchen for a glass of water and saw Claire out on the patio overlooking the rocky beach far below, standing atop the low stone rail that marked the end of terra firman and the beginning of the abyss. Her arms stretched wide, her face bathed in moonglow, one foot over the edge, indecision hovering over the moment like a guillotine, or Thao’s machete. For a moment he wondered if he was still dreaming, but no. This was real. This was really happening.
He walked gently through the open door and across the cobbled patio and reached for her hand.
She turned to him, her long brown hair streaming in the freshening wind coming through the Golden Gate, filaments of her hair backlighted and shimmering in the moonlight. He said not a word, then stepped up onto the wide stone wall beside her and looked out over the sea.
“Isn’t life spectacular?” she asked, her voice full of wonder.
He squeezed her hand gently and looked up at the moon. Suddenly he felt unbalanced but as quickly he felt her reach out and steady him, as always the big sister protecting her little brother.
“Come on,” she whispered. “We’d better get you down before you fall and take me with you.”
He smiled inwardly, knowingly, and followed her down to the patio. “I was going to get some water,” he said when they were both back on solid ground. “Want anything?”
“Coffee, I think.”
He looked at his watch and nodded. It would start getting light out in about a half hour, and he’d already packed for his flight back to Kennedy so he had time. “Coffee it is,” he said as he led her back inside the house.
“I hate it when you leave,” she said drearily.
“Me too.”
“Can’t you transfer here?”
“I might be able to but it’ll be a few years. And I do seem to recall buying a house back there.”
“You haven’t told me about her.”
He turned and looked at her. “Who?”
“You can’t keep things from me, little brother. Especially the big things.”
“I haven’t met anyone important, Claire, other than the realtor who sold me the house. I took her out for pizza and we talked for a while.”
“Is she nice?”
“She seems nice, but dark clouds line the horizon and I’m not sure I want to…”
“To take care of another crazy bitch?”
He chuckled. “No, no, I’m not sure I want to get involved until I’m somewhere I can settle down. And not until I can see myself settling down.”
“And…? What’s the most important reason? The real reason…?”
He grinned. “I know, I know, I need my big sister’s seal of approval.”
“Right you are! So, when are you going to bring her out here?”
“You are relentless, aren’t you?”
“I can see it in your eyes, Bill. I can see her written in your eyes, and there are like little footprints written all over your soul, too. Are they leading her to you?”
“To me?”
“Or to wherever she wants to take you.”
“Sounds awfully one-sided, Claire.”
“C’est la vie, Bill.”
“Tu as l’air si sûr de toi. Pourquoi?”
She shrugged off his question, watched him move as he made coffee. “Are you all packed?” she finally asked as he handed her a fresh cup.
“Yup. Last night. Want to drive me, or should I call a taxi?”
“Would you mind so much if I begged off this time?”
“No, not at all. I know you hate that car.”
She smiled. “No I don’t. That car is so you, Bill, and how could I hate that?”
“Maybe we should get something you can drive?”
“No, there’s no need. I hate driving as much as you love flying, and besides, I don’t mind taking a taxi.”
“Are you ever going to go out on a date?” he asked, raising the specter of some old, long simmering insecurities.
“No. Are you?”
“If the right girl comes along, yeah.”
“Same here,” she said obstinately. “But the problem with that, oh brother of mine, is that the right girl already has come along, but you won’t admit it.”
He shook his head. “Man, you are stubborn.”
“So, have you seen our dear sister yet?”
He shook his head. “Not likely. I don’t feel like going to prison. Again.”
“You’ll have to make peace with her some day, no matter how much the idea repulses you.”
“Doubtful.”
“Dad isn’t going to live forever. I mean, you do know that, right?”
“That tends to happen to us all, Claire, whether we care to admit it or not.”
“Oh, you could go all religious on us, prattle on about salvation and the afterlife.”
“Me?” he asked, his face impassive.
“It could happen.”
“And lightning could strike you in the ass the next time you walk down to the beach…”
She scowled at that. “Don’t be vulgar, Bill. It doesn’t suit you.”
“If you say so.” They looked at one another and laughed, then he finished his coffee and called for a taxi, and as the run from Sea Cliff to SFO was a pricey one, the driver made it out in record time. He went to his bedroom and got his grip, then went to the door to say his goodbyes.
She stood on her tip-toes and hugged him. “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” she said as she started to cry again.
“Let me know when the piano gets settled into her new home. I’ll shoot for two weeks from next Friday.”
She walked with him out to the red and yellow taxi, taking his arm in hers. “You never told me her name, you know?”
“Liz.”
“Liz. I like that. Bring her with you next time.”
He shook his head and grinned as he got in the cab’s back seat. “You’re never going to drop this, are you?”
“Only when you do.”
+++++
The next afternoon he caught the crew bus out to T5 and made his way to the dispatch office; he picked up the weather briefing and the anticipated fuel load-out, then walked through the terminal to gate 7, not bothering to check and see who was flying left seat that evening. The TriStar was coming off a maintenance check and had just been towed to the gate, and as soon as the Jetway was docked he made his way out to the closed door and then into the cockpit. First things first. Get the shore power online then the Carousel IV-Bs spinning up, ready to input their IRS settings, their Inertial Reference Settings that would tell the inertial navigation system where the nose of the aircraft was. The flight engineer soon walked in and settled into his seat behind the little desk at his station, then the engineer woke up all three primary electrical buses and checked power to the APU while Tennyson walked out of the cockpit and down to the ramp to begin his walk-around. Nose gear first. Check the brake lines for leaks, the tires for tread depth and pressure. Over to number three, check the fan blades then open the inspection door and get a light on the sight gauge, confirm oil and hydraulics for leaks. Head back to check the APU, then around to number one, and finally the mains. Fuel Boss waiting for a signature. Captain Jenkins coming down the stairs to check every item he had just done on his own walk-around, and as usual, the captain signed for the fuel once he’d cross-checked the load against the manifest from dispatch.
Passengers were loading when Bill walked back up the Jetway stairs, so he stopped and talked to a few of them, inviting a couple of twin boys up to the cockpit to take a quick look around. He let them sit in his seat and when Jenkins came in the old man told the other boy to take the Captain’s Chair, the left seat. The boys left a few minutes later, wide-eyed and talking excitedly to their grateful parents about how cool it was up there.
Jenkins asked the lead flight attendant where the boys were sitting, then he turned to Bill. “Once we get up to cruise and after everyone’s been fed, bring them back up here and let them see the panel at night. That always wows them…”
Bill smiled. “You opening up a flight school? Drumming up business?”
Gene smiled too. “One of the perks of the business, Bill. Opening eyes. You never know how big an impression you’ll make. Maybe turn a life around, or help a family through a rough patch.”
Bill studied Eugene Jenkins’ face as the old man spoke. He sincerely wanted to be an ambassador to the career path, and to TWA. What he was doing was priceless, quietly and in a way few corporate types could fathom. Bill appreciated that and let his Captain know it.
“So, Liz told me you bought her house on Pearl?”
“Yessir. Looks like we’ll close next week.”
“Janet and I have been going to the church across the street from you for a while now.”
“Beautiful building.”
“Have you been inside?”
“No sir, not yet, but I’d like to after I get settled in.”
“We’d love to have you join us one Sunday,” Jenkins said casually.
“I’d like that, sir.”
And curiously, with that said the old man relaxed a little. Had he now assumed his FO was a true believer? – and as Bill watched he assumed that in Jenkins’ world being a Christian was a Very Good Thing. “What did you think of Liz?” Jenkins asked a few minutes later, as they worked through the pre-engine start checklist.
“She seems, oh, I don’t know the best word to describe her, but maybe really sweet. We went out for pizza last week.”
And Jenkins relaxed further as he began to talk about her. It seemed that Liz was like family to Gene and Janet and the rest of his family, and she’d been their kid’s babysitter for years. She had been an integral part of many family gatherings, and had even been included on a couple of family camping trips through the church’s youth program, and Bill was getting a clearer picture of both this captain and the girl he’d asked out to dinner.
“Yeah, she went through a rough patch a few years ago. She dated just one fella all the way through high school, and when she went off to Yale he went into the Warrant Officer Training Program, went down to Texas and learned how to fly helicopters. Well, the boy went to Vietnam and didn’t come back, and then she went to pieces. His name, by the way, was Ross Betancourt.”
Bill stopped what he was doing at that point and looked at Jenkins. “Gloria’s son?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s a fact. And when Elizabeth’s father got sick Gloria stepped in and helped pick up the pieces. Helped Liz get her real estate license, got her working in the office. Janet and I took her to Paris last spring, anything to get her out of this dark place she’s been in. How was she with you?”
Bill told her about her brief breakdown when showing the house and Jenkins nodded.
“That sounds about right,” Jenkins said, then he was all business again as the TriStar was pushed back from the gate and they went through the engine start checklists. Their takeoff and climb out were practiced, and as the airliner passed the southern tip of Greenland Bill went back and brought the twins forward. They took turns sitting in the right seat and looking at the panel all lit up at night really got the kids going, and standing there watching them Bill wondered what having kids of his own would be like. Settling down and starting a family was simply something he’d never given much thought to, and in a way he’d always assumed that was something he’d never do. And, he had to admit, memories of his parent’s fights had left painful scars, but watching these kids left him wondering: ‘It didn’t have to be that way.’ Watching Captain Jenkins interacting with the boys got him to thinking, as well. Jenkins was a natural. He had a knack for getting these kids interested, for sparking a sense of wonder, then letting the boys’ curiosity run free. He answered questions in a way that made the boys think about the next part of the equation. And, of course, Jenkins had Junior Pilot wings to give to them before they left the cockpit, and he even pinned them to each boy’s shirt.
“So, you have any plans tonight?” Gene said after the boys were escorted back to their seats.
“No, but I wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum, look at some of the Battle of Britain displays.”
“You haven’t been yet?”
“Nope.”
“I go there a couple of times a year, at least when I stay in the city.”
“There’s hardly enough time to do anything on these layovers, you know?”
Jenkins nodded. “We’re not tourists, Bill.”
“That’s for damn sure,” their flight engineer sighed.
“What are you doing today, Roger?” Gene asked.
“Sleeping. Twenty hours, nonstop. I just came in from Frankfurt.”
A half hour later Jenkins wiped some sweat from his forehead then shook his head as he turned to Bill. “I’m gonna hit the head. Your airplane.”
Bill nodded and donned his oxygen mask, put his hand on the yoke as the motor under Jenkins’ seat whirred and his seat slid aft, then he watched to make sure Gene’s legs or feet didn’t hit anything on the way out before returning his attention to the panel.
A moment later something caught his eye high and to their left and as he looked a great splash of green and purple washed across the sky. “Damn, look at that! That’s a bright aurora…”
The engineer nodded. “We’ll lose HF soon, I betcha.”
That meant being out of radio contact until they were much closer to Iceland or Shannon, Ireland, but these blackouts happened frequently enough to not be a big deal. He turned back to the panel and noted their location on the inertial navigator.
“How far are we from Iceland?” the FE asked.
“About 270 miles, just about due south of there now. Why?”
“I hate it when the high frequency band is down, especially when we’re out this far.”
The intercom chimed. One of the flight attendants calling from the forward galley.
“Yo,” Tennyson said.
“Bill, there’s something wrong with the captain…I think he’s having a heart attack.”
“Did you see if there’s a physician onboard?”
“There isn’t, not even a nurse.”
He turned to the engineer. “Roger, go check on the captain.”
Roger was out the door in an instant, and Tennyson pulled out the airway chart covering this part of the North Atlantic Ocean. He looked for Keflavik in his Jeppesen, then entered waypoints into INS-2. The intercom chimed again.
“Yo,” Tennyson said.
“Bill?” the stewardess on the intercom said. “Roger is doing CPR. I don’t know what to do.” The girl sounded stressed, not quite hysterical but headed that way.
“Make sure any passengers who’ve seen anything are kept informed and let them know we have plenty of qualified crew on board. And Betsy, keep it together, okay? That’s your job right now.”
“Right. Okay, Bill.”
He got up and moved over to the left seat and entered the waypoint data into the captain’s INS, then executed the course change. Next, enter Keflavik’s radio and VOR frequencies, and he tried Keflavik approach on the radio. Nothing.
Perhaps ten minutes later the flight engineer returned to the cockpit and when Bill saw his ashen face he didn’t even ask. He looked away and shook his head, then turned to Roger as he sat. “Get up here and start scanning, would you? We’re crossing the westbound tracks now.”
“Anything on VHF?”
Bill shook his head as he pointed at the waypoint data on the INS. “Frequencies are entered. Start checking again at 125 miles.”
The intercom chimed. Betsy needed help moving Gene’s body to the galley on the lower level.
“You can handle that, Betsy,” Bill said, cutting her off.
The TriStar was at thirty one thousand feet above the Atlantic, and he’d need to begin their descent soon. “How much fuel do we have?”
“We’re okay…we’ll be about twenty under our max landing weight.”
“Okay.”
“You doing okay?” the FE asked.
“Yup, I’m nominal.”
“Nominal, eh? Haven’t heard that one in a while.”
Tennyson watched as the VOR twitched, then locked-on to the beacon at Keflavik. “Try ‘em now,” he said to Roger.
The NATO controllers in the tower responded on their next call, and Bill advised the controller of the situation onboard. Current conditions at the airport were vintage North Atlantic winter: forty knot winds with gusts to fifty-five and a very heavy snow falling.
“Keflavik, TWA 12, you have any clear runways down there?” he asked.
“Runway zero-two is open but marginal, currently with about three inches of snow over patchy ice.”
“Okay, can you set up a PAR approach for us?”
“Roger, precision radar approach approved. Will you need any equipment standing by?”
“Just a, well, I guess a coroner, or whoever you have available.”
“Was it a member of your flight crew?”
“Yes, it was the captain.”
“Understood, -12, I’ll get the latest weather updates to you in a minute.”
Technically, the L-1011 had the first FAA approved ‘autoland’ system in domestic commercial operation, but the Collins FD-108 Flight Director still needed accurate setup to function properly, and Tennyson didn’t yet feel like trusting the autopilot to handle a heavily loaded aircraft under such challenging conditions. He was used to working PAR approaches from his carrier training, and the command bars inside his main attitude display made following the localizer and glide slope an intuitively easy chore; all that was left now was to enter the radio frequencies needed.
“TWA 12, Keflavik approach, plows hitting the runway right now, estimate runway clear in one five minutes. Base medical will handle the transfer. Assume you’ll need to refuel, or will you be parking for the night?”
“Uh, Keflavik, we’ll need to call company dispatch but we won’t be taking off without a full flight crew.”
“Understood, twelve. Squawk 1244 and report passing twelve thousand on the inbound.”
He acknowledged and focused on the HSI, watching the autopilot’s inputs on the course deviation indicator, and he called in when the aircraft reached 12,000 feet.
“Roger, twelve, turn left to zero-two-zero and descend to seven thousand, report picking up the localizer.”
“TWA 12, left to 020 and descending to seven thousand.”
He watched the stars disappear as the TriStar entered the solid layer of cloud. “Okay, let’s get bleed air to the nacelles,” he said as he made sure the pitot tubes, the critical speed measurement probes mounted just under the windscreens, were being heated, as well. Snow was streaking by the cockpit windshield, the glass so cold the snow couldn’t stick. Company procedure was to use heat to slowly heat up the glass, to, theoretically anyway, keep it from shattering.
“TWA 12 at seven,” he called in a few minutes later.
“Roger, 12, come left five, descend and maintain five thousand.”
“Twelve, left five and 5,000.” He turned to the FE: “I think the glass is warm enough now to use full heat.” He then picked up the intercom and switched to ship-wide. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is First Officer Tennyson. As you know we’ve had a medical issue and I wanted to let you know we have diverted to Keflavik, Iceland. Conditions there are just awful, but we’ll be on the ground in about ten minutes. As soon as we know what’s going on with the remainder of your journey one of us will let you know. That will probably happen once we’re in the terminal, so hang on, we’ll let you know as soon as we can. Flight attendants, prepare the cabin for arrival.”
The aircraft pitched up and to the left as a strong gust hit, and after the autopilot countered with immediate inputs to correct, Bill nodded his head appreciatively. “Not bad, not bad at all old girl,” he said just loud enough to be heard.
The FE chuckled. “You do know that this old bird has about 400 hours on her, right?”
“Yeah, don’t you just love that new airplane smell…?”
+++++
A replacement crew flew in on Icelandic Airlines later the next morning, and both he and Roger returned on the next Icelandic flight to Kennedy. And they stood on the ramp while Gene’s coffin was loaded in the forward cargo hold, then boarded the DC-8. Almost everyone in coach was smoking pot and by the time they landed in New York he felt higher than a kite. They went straight to the dispatch office and were interviewed by company lawyers and investigators from the CAB and the NTSB. Later that evening he made it to his hotel, and he called Liz to let her know what had happened.
“I know,” she said. “Gloria told me this morning. Someone from the airline came by and told Janet, and she called Gloria. Do you know what happened?”
“No, not really, but we think he had a heart attack. He seemed fine up until he got up to use the restroom, and I guess it hit him in there.”
“There was something about it on the news earlier this afternoon. They mentioned you.”
“Oh, great.”
She laughed at that. “So, how are you doing?” she asked.
“All things considered, I guess I’m okay, but it hurts. Kind of knocked the stuffing out of me for a minute, but losing control ain’t in my job description, ya know?”
“I guess not.” She paused and it felt like she wanted to ask him a question…
“So, I know it’s not the right time to ask, but how about dinner?”
“When?” she asked, and he could hear the relief in her voice.
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, sure. You want to go to that seafood place?”
“Sounds good to me. I’ve got to shower so I’ll be out on the 5:40.”
She met him at the little station in her mustard yellow Pinto and she drove him east along the shore to the harbor in Huntington, to an old clam shack that had been there since forever and they drank frosted ‘schooners’ of ice cold beer and had fried clams and cod, and even though it was very cold outside they walked along the waterfront for a while, and he never pushed her to talk about more than she wanted. No talk of her boyfriend, of her relationship to the Betancourt family, or even to Gene and Janet Jenkins.
Indeed, she always seemed to be walking along a razor’s edge, with defiance on one side and a stuttering vulnerability on the other. After her second beer she loosened up a little, yet in short order she became brittle and then a little mean. Little sarcasms at first, with a quip about the ‘hero pilot’ rounding out their evening. She dropped him at the station in time for the last train into the city and when he settled into the seat on the train he felt a little relieved to have escaped intact. He decided that if he did in fact take her out on another date he would take her to see The Exorcist.
+++++
He drew up plans for a minor kitchen remodel and engaged a contractor, and after the house on Pearl closed he bought some furniture and moved in. Liz and Gloria came by early that evening, Liz hopeful and Gloria grateful, and they came bearing gifts of flowers and freshly baked cakes. He did his best to entertain them but in truth he was growing wary of Liz. She was obviously smart but had a mean streak, and the obvious parallels to his sister Ann were growing more obvious by the hour. Yet he’d purchased her family’s home, so…why? Had some part of him wanted her? As a mate? When that wasn’t a rational choice? Was buying the first house he walked through rational, or just impulsive? He had to admit there was a part of him that had wanted to impress her. Yeah, Liz, but maybe Gloria too.
And the thought bothered him. Enough to suddenly question all his motives.
He’d spent enough time in Hanoi to understand human depravity, and he’d been bullied by his sister Ann long enough to realize that some people were indeed born just plain mean, but he’d had very little experience with good people. Claire was, in her way, a kind soul, and her kindness resided in her ability to see and understand when something was wrong. He’d learned that from her, too, yet he had a difficult time seeing Claire as a good person. He now saw her as damaged and in need of help, that she needed someone to watch over not just her finances but also her general wellbeing.
Watching Gloria watch Liz was illuminating, too. Gloria had taken over the role of mother-protector after the death of Liz’s father, and even as they walked through his new home he saw how protective she’d become. But…why? And why was Liz so vulnerable?
As he watched them he began to understand that both women were simply needy. As in: Gloria needed to be a mother, and Liz needed one. The dynamics of a caretaker and an invalid. Was the mean streak he’d seen in Liz a manifestation of that neediness, or simple resentment at having been shoehorned into that role. In other words, was Liz even salvageable?
But, he asked himself as they moved around the old kitchen, looking at his plans for the remodeling, why did he even care? Liz was cute in a way, but Gloria was prettier, more exotic. She moved with an assurance borne of living around great wealth all her life, and she dressed the part. Elegant and sexy best described her, like her Mercedes, while Liz was beginning to seem more like her Pinto. On the surface maybe reliable and cost efficient if rather plain – once you saw through her initial charms.
He offered them ginger ale and soon saw them on their way, then turned to unpacking the things he’d had shipped out from Pasadena. The Bell Telephone installer came out and hooked up his phones: one in the kitchen, two downstairs and two up, then he added a third in his bathroom because hey, you never know. One thing about being in the business he was in, he couldn’t miss a call from dispatch. He was wondering what to do for dinner when the phone rang.
“Yo,” he answered with his characteristic greeting.
“Yo?” Gloria Betancourt said. “Odd you would say that. Where did you pick that up?”
“Gloria? That you?”
“Yes. I need to come over.”
“Okay. I guess you know the way. The front’s open.”
A few minutes later her Mercedes pulled up out front and she marched in like Patton through Sicily and found him in the kitchen. She walked right up to him and kissed him, hard, her right hand burrowing down until it reached pay dirt. She had his belt unbuckled and his pants down on the floor and was kissing him ferociously, then she was on her knees, taking him in her mouth and not stopping until she had finished him off. With that accomplished she got his pants off and dragged him up the stairs like a leopard dragging a kill up into the trees, and once she’d thrown him down on his new bed she mounted him and didn’t get up until they’d torn each other apart.
To say he was stunned by her feral intensity and by the repressed nature of these events would be coy. And given that he’d been with just one girl in high school, and no one since, he’d had no trouble getting into the groove and staying in the game. They walked to the shower together after several hours and once under the hot water she tore into him again, both soon lost inside an insatiable lust that neither knew had existed – at least not until their heartbeats had joined. Yet what passed between them soon felt more like something trivial. He dried her and she redressed while he dried off, yet when he came out of the bathroom she was gone.
“Well, I will be goddamned,” he muttered as he went to the ringing phone. It was dispatch, and they needed him to come in.
“Of course,” he muttered after he’d hung up. “The perfect end to a perfectly weird day.”
Then the doorbell chimed and Liz was standing there, in tears. “Gloria was here, wasn’t she?”
“What?”
“Gloria. I can smell that bitch on you,” she said as she turned and walked out to her little yellow Ford. As she sped off she flipped him the finger, and he went upstairs to get a freshly pressed uniform ready to go, then he went back to the shower and scrubbed his face once again.
+++++
Rosenthal and Claire had placed the Bösendorfer just so, tucked in one corner of the study off the living room so that she could catch the afternoon light falling on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he had to admit that the Viennese motifs embedded with the various design elements seemed to go with the space. Even though there was an obvious Italianate influence in the home’s design, there was a see-through fireplace between the living room and the studio that contrasted nicely with the green slate floor, and that lent the space a kind of white-washed Bauhaus austerity. Books on mahogany shelves lined the walls and made for a subdued, almost muted acoustic environment, but that too seemed to fit both the instrument and his sister.
She had just finished her Fourth Piano Concerto and was practicing for an upcoming series of performances from San Francisco to Munich, culminating in a performance at the coming summer’s music festivals in Salzburg and Spoleto, and she had at first seemed busy and distracted when he came out a week later. Yet soon enough she noted the change that had come over her little brother.
“What on earth have you done now?” she asked after their usual pleasantries were over.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I know that look,” Claire added.
“What look?” he said, amused yet suddenly feeling a little defensive, too.
“Oh, kind of like the cat who ate the canary look, oh-brother-of-mine.”
“And is that because you have an overactive imagination, or what? Oh-sister-of-mine?”
“What’s her name? It sure wasn’t Liz.”
He looked down. “No, it sure wasn’t,” he sighed.
“And?”
“She’s the broker that oversees Liz, and who was the mother of her boyfriend.”
“Her boyfriend?”
“Helicopter pilot. KIA.”
“Oh, William. You’ve become heartless, just like our sister.”
That stung and he turned away. She reflexively came to him, put her arms around him from behind. “You can’t treat these things so cavalierly, Bill. Sex isn’t meaningless, you know. It isn’t about physical conquest. Or don’t you know that?”
“Claire, it was more the other way around…”
“Ah, the old ‘…a stiff prick has no conscience…’ defense. Really, Bill? I expected more from you.”
He explained the encounter in more detail, a little more detail than was necessary, and she backed off a little. Still, she seemed disappointed in him and he wondered why.
Then he asked her, point blank.
“Because like I mentioned last time you were here, I guess in my fantasy world you’d come and stay here with me, take care of me.” She’d watched the look of growing horror in her brother’s eyes and felt more and more isolated as he turned away.
“You know, it’s not like it wasn’t bad enough that dear old Dad had a think going with Ann, but now you’re telling me…”
“No, I’m not. Nothing like that. I’ve always taken pains to keep the worst of Ann and Dad away from you, haven’t I? How could you even think that…?”
“Aren’t you asking me to spend my life with you? To take care of you?”
She turned away. But she nodded her head just a little, like now she was ashamed of the very idea.
He went to the entry and picked up the suitcase he’d just put down, and then he went to the garage and threw it into the 911s front boot. He looked around and shook his head, then opened the garage door and backed out the driveway, then out onto El Camino del Mar. Claire came out and watched him drive away from her house, then she smiled and went back inside – to that luscious new piano. She was sure she’d done the right thing, too.
After all, he was having such a hard time cutting loose from their past.
III. Autumn
The dreams grew less frequent, and with the passage of time, the shadows longer. Colonel Thao disappeared entirely. Tracy, his wife, became more important to him as time passed, as did his children. There appeared to be no purpose to his most recent dreams, indeed, they often felt like unrelated pastiches of lives that might have been but never were. Because there had been nothing revelatory hidden within his most recent dreams, at least nothing that he understood as such, so his dreams remained a mysteries with no solutions. Then one night he drifted alone on a calm sea and one of the pink creatures suddenly appeared and hovered nearby, just staring at him. He’d felt a cold breeze and turned to see volcanoes erupting along a far horizon, and in a panic he’d spun around in the water, realizing he was alone and suddenly painfully aware of his loneliness.
A fin circled nearby, glistening black and smooth in the liquid sunlight. An orca drifted along lazily until it apparently decided to come closer, perhaps to check him out – and as suddenly the animal surfaced and he found himself eye-to-eye with a deep brown iris, the whites of the animals eye, the sclera, streaked with delicate capillaries, and he was surprised to realize that the animal had eyelids. Its eye was, in fact, just half open. Then he felt more than heard clicking and turned to see several more orcas, and they all seemed to be studying him intently. The pink creature was hovering above them, studying the orcas’ reaction to him, and once he thought the big creature nearest him was trying to tell him something. It had come closer, closer to Tennyson’s face, close enough for Bill to lean in and hear the orca’s breathing, the sharp thud of it’s blowhole opening and closing, and even to feel it’s heart beating to a mysterious rhythm all its own.
The same dream came and went over the years, yet the big orca always seemed to come close and study him. In a recent dream, however, he’d turned to the sound of the erupting volcanoes and the orcas didn’t appear. He turned and turned, looking and then hoping they would show themselves, but…no, they were nowhere to be seen. They had left him. And as suddenly he noticed that the sky was red and the water felt different. He looked up, up beyond the red sky and he saw a huge planet. A large, ringed, blue gas giant and he realized this ocean was on a moon, a moon orbiting the gas giant. And then the pink creature appeared and she was smiling almost lovingly at him as she hovered overhead.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“No? How long can I tread water?” he asked.
“As long as you must. Forever, if need be.”
And then he would wake, bathed in the cold fear of that distant sea.
William Tennyson, Jr., was soon coming up on his 20th anniversary working for TWA, and he had been flying the TriStar all the while. Captains had come and gone, some friends as well, and first officers too, but for better or worse, for richer or poorer, TWA had become his life. The glory years had come and gone, too, as corporate raiders decimated the airline’s most profitable assets, her gate assignments at Kennedy and Heathrow, and these days the remnants of the once mighty carrier were operating out of Lambert Field in St. Louis. TWA still flew to Europe but now their most profitable European corridors were out of Boston to places like Zurich, Paris, and Frankfurt, yet now those planes flew nowhere near capacity and the vultures were circling high overhead.
He’d met his wife, Tracy Hillermann, after working at TWA for two years.
He had been flying New York to Zurich for almost a year, spending his downtime in the Swiss city walking along the Limmatquai, occasionally going to the main station and taking random trains out of the city to unknown villages, and once on the ground he was exploring, searching, trying out obscure trails or out of the way cafés.
On one flight to Kennedy from Zurich he walked back to the galley mid-flight, primarily to stretch his legs but also to get some coffee. There were the usual suspects gathered there, FAs he’d worked with dozens of times over the years, but there was a new girl working up front under the watchful eye of a training supervisor. This happened often enough, so often he rarely took note of these new hires. Until this girl turned and he got a good look at her. Looking at her was literally heart-stopping, and he couldn’t remember running across a prettier girl – not ever. Not exactly tall, maybe five foot-eight or so, and he knew she was in shape just by looking at her. Yet it was her eyes that nailed him.
But isn’t that always the case?
So he did what he always did. He had tried to ignored her.
He was a senior FO by then, and still conspicuously single. And the girls usually talked about that ‘single guy up front’ when they were working the same flight with him. A few of the single girls had tried to get him at least interested, yet he rarely responded to them with anything more than a polite smile. Some gossiped, of course. He had to be gay – that was one of the more malignant rumors he’d heard – but there were others. And yet, he had to admit, he simply didn’t care.
He had carried on with Gloria Betancourt for a while, until he grew tired of the emotional conditions she’d imposed on their affair. She refused, she told him one evening, to get more deeply involved. She’d done that twice and it hadn’t worked out, and besides, Bill was fifteen years younger so it was just impossible. Then she laid out the bare truth: All she wanted was the occasional fuck, and the rougher the better. He did take her to Paris for a long weekend but the same constraints applied; she had no interest in doing the usual romantic things together, no crepes at midnight by the Cluny, no walks hand in hand through the Tuileries. After that miserable weekend he began pulling away, and soon enough she stopped calling. Liz never, not even once, called or dropped by, and he was happy enough with that outcome. As beguiling as she might have once been, he’d seen only danger ahead, even though he’d been tempted.
He had majored in aeronautical engineering at Annapolis, and while not the greatest student he had at least maintained High Honors at graduation, and soon enough he found himself wanting to return to school. The best option academically was either CalTech, Berkeley, or MIT, but he wanted to stay on the East Coast so applied to MIT. And he was accepted. That had meant completely rearranging his life, from where he lived to where he was home-based, but Boston Logan was not simply the obvious choice, it was his only option if he wanted to resume school part time.
Coordinating the move with his change of assignment proved easier than expected, and it only took him a few weeks to sell the house on Pearl, then he spent more than he wanted on a just remodeled walkup on the corner of Chestnut and Willow, near Beacon Hill. The house, a narrow five story walkup, had been built before California was even a state and someone had recently spent real money updating the old structure. He now had no yard at all, and he’d had to find a garage to simply house his old Porsche, yet he was happy with the location and working with dispatch he’d been able to get a schedule that allowed him to return to school on a part time basis.
But even after moving to Boston he still got calls to work flights out of Kennedy, which meant hopping on a shuttle to New York, which often meant sitting in the jumpseat of overcrowded 727s making the half hour flight. And on one of those spurious assignments he saw Tracy Hillermann. And he – tried – to ignore her.
+++++
“Hi there,” she said as he stepped into the galley area in front of First Class. “Can I get you something?” Her accent was pure Texas yet she didn’t look like she’d grown up on a ranch. She was more Dallas, that so-called Paris on the Prairie, and even a close look revealed that she came from money. The little gold Rolex on her wrist, the perfect teeth and clear skin, and a subtle perfume sparingly applied. Her uniform, even after serving lunch, was perfect. In other words, she cared how she presented herself and that came from upbringing. Then again maybe she was simply on her best behavior because she was being graded.
“Howdy,” he replied. “Coffee, please.”
He’d leaned against the galley counter and watched her work. Not self-conscious at all. Her motions sure, not hesitant. Her figure perfect, her eyes killing him when she looked his way.
“You take it black?” she asked with a warm smile. Not fake, he observed. Real warmth.
“No, not this battery acid. As much cream and sugar as you can lay your hands on.”
She had smiled again, and politely too, as she handed him the cup and a spoon to stir, then their eyes had met once again and she held him there for a long moment.
Strange how one moment can change the arc of a life. Interesting how one moment can change the course of a lifetime.
After they’d parked at the gate he wrapped up the ‘meet and greet’ routine as passengers deplaned, he helped a couple of the flight attendants with their bags before he got Tracy’s out of the crew’s luggage compartment.
“Thanks,” she said as she took the rolling bag. And there it was, he said to himself, that good eye contact once again. No evasion, no wariness.
“You are welcome,” he replied, their eyes still locked.
Crew usually walk to customs together and they did so that evening; he helped her with her rolling bag as she fumbled for her passport and, as he usually just carried a small fold-over to keep his uniforms reasonably neat, he slung that over his shoulder then helped her through the terminal – until they reached the dispatch office.
He had to go in and finish up paperwork so he turned to her. “I have some stuff to do in here,” he as he stopped outside the door, “but if you wouldn’t mind waiting a few minutes I’ll help you out to the shuttle.”
A couple of the other FAs did a double take when they heard that, and yet Tracy just smiled a little as she sized him up again. “Sure. You doin’ anything tonight?” she’d asked, blowing them over.
“You want to grab something?” he asked, his heart skipping a beat.
“Sure. Sounds good.”
And so they went out. Things clicked and they started seeing each other. Every now and then, and then a lot. She applied for a posting in Boston and got it. She began flying from Boston to St Louis to Fort Myers but it was a start. She moved in with him a few weeks after that and she was the first to mention marriage and maybe having kids and he knew right away that she was the one to do that with, to do the whole family thing. Her father did indeed own a ranch down in the Texas Hill Country, but while he ran cattle he had a foreman on site to handle the day to day, so he was a weekend rancher at best.
Because Ted Hillermann was a banker, and he owned car dealerships in five states and was known around Dallas for having started with nothing and had then worked his way up to the top. Tracy was, by the way, the apple of his eye, his pride and joy. Her father came up to Boston to meet Bill when it looked like things were turning serious, but the most obvious issue was that of age. Tennyson was now in his late 30s, but Tracy was just 24. Ted Hillermann had been a little less than impressed with that and so had engaged the services of an investigative firm to dig up some dirt on Tennyson, only to read the synopsis and drop all his objections. The kid, in his eyes, seemed like the real deal.
After securing Ted’s permission, Bill got down on one knee and asked for her hand and it was as simple as that. Over and done with, a little slicker than eel snot. Of course he invited his father and sisters to the wedding, and of course they came to the Methodist Church in Highland Park, and to the reception at the Dallas Petroleum Club. Tracy had wanted to honeymoon in Tahiti so off they went, spending the first two days of their marriage sitting in airplanes, staring at the shadows of clouds on the dappled sea six miles below, both wondering if what they had just done was really the right thing to do…?
But don’t all newlyweds?
They spent a few days on the main island, wandering around the streets of Papeete poking their heads into shops and art galleries, eating French food a million miles from France yet really right in the heart of it. And one day they found themselves walking along the waterfront, looking at all the sailboats tied off in neat, orderly rows, with sunburnt sailors everywhere they looked.
“I wonder what that’s like?” said the girl from Paris on the Prairie as they looked at sailboats from California and Seattle, and from Germany, the Netherlands and, of course, from France. “All alone out there, thousands of miles from land, just the sea and your boat?”
Bill nodded. “I used to watch boats just like these heading out the Golden Gate when I’d visit Claire. Some of them turned left and headed down the coast, but every now and then you’d see one just heading straight out, like due west, pointing towards Hawaii. One weekend we watched the start of a single handers race from her house. Ten boats heading to Hawaii. Ten people out there by themselves. I wondered what that must feel like, thinking that your life is so important and then you’re out there in a storm at night and realize that the universe really doesn’t think too much of you, if at all. I wondered how small the world would feel when it got reduced to a few square feet of boat underfoot. Maybe how small those sailors started to feel when civilization just disappeared in their wakes.
So they’d gone down to the docks and found a couple of people working on their boats and asked them all the usual questions. ‘Where are you coming from? Where you headed next?’ And of course, ‘What’s it like out there?’
And she had asked a rather bohemian looking man from Portland, Oregon that question, and he had turned thoughtful and looked up at the sky then at her before answering. “Everyone has a different experience of life on the open ocean, I guess? Every voyage is defined by the usual sunsets and storms, the uncertainty of standing watch at night when it’s so dark out the sea and the stars just seem to blend in. But then there are the mountains along the far horizon, and everyone has their own take on that too, but everyone has to confront their truest self out there, you have to come to terms with yourself – as you are in that moment – because your first landfall after a long crossing will tell you all you need to know.”
Bill looked at the man’s boat. There were tools and nuts and bolts scattered everywhere yet there appeared to be an underlying order within the apparent chaos. “What are you working on?” he’d asked.
“Oh, the Monitor, the self-steering wind-vane, keeps sheering two bolts on it’s mounting plate.”
“Too much stress on the plate,” Bill said. “Maybe the bolt is too small, or the mounting holes might have been drilled at an incorrect angle?”
And so the three of them spent the next two hours remounting the self-steering gear on the stranger’s boat, then they took their new friend out to dinner. They talked boats and trips the man had taken and where he might go next. He’d been an engineer for Hewlett-Packard until he’d had enough, and then he’d chucked it all, bought his boat, a 34 foot Pacific Seacraft, and spent a few months fixing her up before he sailed to San Diego and then on to the Sea of Cortez. He’d spend a few years in Mexico then set out for Panama, the Galapagos Islands and finally, he’d laid out his course to French Polynesia and off he went. He’d been to Fiji and had just returned to Papeete, where he’d had his boat hauled out for Typhoon season and gone back to the States. Now, he said, he was heading south to New Zealand, and then he just didn’t know. He wanted to go to Japan but had heard cruisers weren’t really welcome, but what about Alaska? Or the Seychelles and South Africa? The world was, quite literally, just out there, quietly waiting for those with a sense of adventure.
Again, it was just one of those moments where the arc of life shifted just a little, shifted perhaps into the wildly unpredictable, but Bill Tennyson was just beginning to find that out about Tracy. There wasn’t a mountain she didn’t want to climb or a trail she didn’t want to take. And now, suddenly, there wasn’t an ocean she didn’t want to cross.
Yet she had always wanted kids, too. At least two, and he knew where that came from.
When her father, Ted, had ‘The Talk’ with him at the wedding reception, among other things he’d told Bill that he had wanted “at least a dozen kids, all boys,” but that his wife had died when Tracy was little. So he’d ended up with Tracy and had somehow been more than happy with how things turned out. “Some people,” he said, “go where life takes them, you know, they go with the flow. But I couldn’t do that, Bill. I’d always grabbed life by the balls – and then I made what I wanted out of it, but dammit, once I held that little girl in my arms, well sir, that was it. After her mother passed, Tracy became my reason for living and pretty soon, wouldn’t you just know it, I was hanging on for the ride just like everyone else. Going where life had decided to take me. So, Bill, you have to realize that there are things out there you just can’t fight. Some things are gonna be bigger than you. And, yeah-yeah, I see the look in your eyes, but listen to me now, ‘cause this is important. What I’m sayin’ is sure, yeah, you can fight it all you like, but in the end you’d better learn how to hang on.”
So Bill Tennyson stood beside his wife, standing there above the docks looking down on rows and rows of sailboats tied off in that faraway marina, their masts clanging as they rolled in the swells of waning breezes. He watched her looking at all those dreams tied off down there in that little marina, and while he had to admit that he really didn’t know her very well yet, he was sure about one thing.
His life with Tracy was about to get interesting, and it would never be predictable.
+++++
Tracy was a good mother, and conscientiously so. She worked at it. Worked at it because motherhood was something completely foreign to her. Her mother had passed from breast cancer when she was quite young; coincidentally at almost the same age as Bill when he lost his mother. As such, both could not rely on memories of their mothers as role models; their mothers imprinted little save what was passed on during a time when memory is capricious, more fleeting impression than solid foundation.
The first of two girls was born after Tracy and Bill had been married a year, the second hardly two years later. By the time Doris and Evelyn were finishing high school, Bill was seriously considering retirement – now that he’d earned his PhD in aerospace engineering, and now that TWA had been through multiple bankruptcies and, just the year before, the Flight 800 tragedy had rocked the airline. Load factors on their remaining all important routes to Europe were falling, and analysts were saying it was now just a matter of months. Bill was young enough to start a second career, yet he did not want to give up flying.
Years ago he had let go of his animosities long enough to call his sister Ann, first for the wedding and then just before Doris was born, inviting her up to Boston for a baby shower – at Tracy’s insistence. Claire had therefore refused to come – until Tracy intervened and talked to her, literally almost begging Claire to come. There had been a minor rapprochement for the occasion, and soon there was talk of a big family reunion.
And Tracy decided to make that happen, because, to her, family had become the most important thing, and everything was soon set up by Tracy. Her father flew in for the occasion, as did Bill’s family, then everyone drove up the coast in rental cars and enjoyed a week together at a waterfront lodge on the Maine coast.
Both fathers were of course by now retired, though both ‘kept their hand in the game’ – as time permitted. They talked about colonoscopies and constipation, the bane of old men everywhere, and of course of friends who had recently passed. Both were avid golfers, so they played the course at the Samoset Resort every morning as soon as the course opened, and ‘in due course’ getting to know one another. Bill Jr, meanwhile, mediated encounters between his sisters and still managed to play a round with the patriarchs when he wasn’t mediating arguments between Doris and Evelyn. Or Ann and Claire. As a result, he developed a wary respect for the role estrogen had played in the development of civilization.
But this first week together in June soon became a new family tradition, a sort of coming together that allowed a new level of familial cohesion to take root. “For the girls’ sake,” became Bill’s rallying cry to Claire and Ann. At the end of each week the family had their picture taken in front of the huge stone fireplace in the main lodge, and soon there were five such pictures on the wall in Bill’s study, then ten, then fifteen…
There was always a Sunday Brunch at the lodge, a sumptuous affair complete with a piano player grinding his way through a tired repertoire of jazz standards, and despite this grinding music the family always enjoyed their buffet together, usually just before returning home. And the year before Doris graduated from high school the family came together again, and here the arc of Bill’s life, indeed, all their lives seemed to shift again.
At one point during brunch, the pianist, a grizzled old man who seemed as bored as his playing, launched into a savagely fast rendering of the Claire de lune, and at that point Claire had simply had enough. She stood in an angry huff and went to the pisno and lit into the poor hack, berating him in front of everyone in the dining room.
The hack, of course, did not recognize Claire Tennyson. Though she was by then an accomplished concert pianist and noted composer of classical works, and more recently had one Oscar winning movie score to her credit, when he told the overbearing woman to take over if she thought she could do better, he was in for an unpleasant comeuppance.
Claire pushed him aside and began again, and she floated lazily into the piece, just as she always had, playing so softly, and so lovingly that everyone in attendance simply stopped eating and slowly began to listen to what was unfolding. Murmurs of recognition soon drifted among the more attuned diners; by the time she finished the piece word had spread and the room burst into applause. Claire smiled, faintly if appreciatively, then turned to the old man who’d butchered Debussy and scowled at him, a withering, knowing takedown from one professional to another. She then returned to the family’s table and rejoined the conversation as if nothing had happened…
…yet something had…
+++++
Her brother was still sitting there at the table, yet in truth he was far, far away.
+++++
He was, in fact, on a sailboat – resting at anchor in an unrecognizably small harbor far, far from Maine. The water was the color of turquoise verging on silver, a light trade wind was sifting through his hair and the sun was beating down on his forehead. He turned and looked at the island, at the palm trees – most of these palms not tall but low, stunted things – that lined the harbor, and a few hundred feet away the turquoise shallows dropped away to reveal a deep cobalt blue that took his breath away. Tracy was on the beach, waving at him, then calling out to him, yet he could not make out what she was saying.
He felt a familiar presence and turned away from Tracy, and yes, the pink butterfly creature with the owl’s eyes hovered just a few feet away from him, her delicate face perhaps five feet from his own, and she was regarding him silently, almost quizzically.
‘Why have you come back to us,’ the pink creature seemed to say to him, the voice as ever unheard yet as clear as any ever spoken. ‘Was it the music that sent you?’
“I’m not sure I know,” he replied. “I was with my…with Claire…and then, yes, I was inside the music…”
‘You have denied this place for so long, yet you chose to come now. Why?’
“I…chose? But…how? I’ve never been here before…and I didn’t choose anything.”
The creature’s eyes smiled, her head tilted quizzically. ‘Oh?’ she said. “Are you so sure?”
He turned and looked further up the shore, and he thought he saw Claire standing there, but no, the woman he saw there was impossibly old. He heard another voice nearby and now a rising tide of panic hit as he wheeled around to this new voice. Another woman was waving at him from a boat anchored no more than 50 yards away.
“Dad, are you alright?” the stranger called out.
He didn’t know what to say, because, after all, this was a dream, wasn’t it? But…who was this other woman? She wasn’t his daughter…she was a…a stranger? Yet why did her voice seem so familiar?”
But by then he’d remembered that he had never smelled things in his dreams before, yet right now he thought he could pick out the scents of bread baking in the nearby village, and then all the fresh flowers blooming on shrubbery along the beach.
“Dad?” the woman called out again.
“Yo! I think so,” he replied. “Actually, I’m not sure…”
Within seconds the woman had jumped down into her Zodiac and started the little Yamaha outboard, and as Bill watched he shook his head because boats and motors didn’t have brand names posted so vividly in dreams. Or did they? Or could this be what was called lucid dreaming?
Yeah. That’s it.
By now Tracy was running to their own inflatable, untying the painter from a palm tree and pushing off from shore. She started the motor and was now racing out to their boat…
“Our boat?” he asked the universe. “When did we get a goddamn boat? And when did I buy that inflatable?” He watched as these normal yet surreal feelings kept unfolding all around him, and the feeling of panic became pervasive and suffocating, an all encompassing nightmare. “But…didn’t I buy the Zodiac in Newport, at the boat show a couple of years ago?”
Now. Then. If. How. Separate. Realities. Superimposed. Not. Possible.
Why? Not?
His thoughts seemed to come in molten waves as he fell back against the companionway and then slid against the coaming.
“This isn’t right. Something doesn’t feel right.”
Again, the rising tide of bile. The empty panic of nowhere left to hide.
He sat up a little, took a sip of peach nectar from the clear blue drinking glass in the cupholder on the binnacle. There was condensation on the glass, and the nectar tasted fresh, just like Tracy had made it this morning. Because he remembered seeing her do just that. A million years ago. Or…was it a billion?
And then he saw his hands. They were the age-spotted hands of an old man, and nothing like his own. But no, there was the scar on his left forearm, the scar a remnant of his crash landing outside of Hanoi – fifty years ago, then he was perspiring and disoriented as his Intruder skidded through a small village, shocked people scrambling to get out of the flaming wreckage that was spilling through their homes. So he looked at the condensation on the blue glass before he finished the nectar and then he leaned forward, resting his head in his outstretched hands. He felt someone caressing his shoulders and expected to see Claire after their mother stopped screaming at their father and when he looked up he saw the pink creature was now sitting by his side.
‘Are you tired?’ he felt her ask.
“Tired? I don’t…I don’t think so…?”
‘Death is near. Would you like to go there now and rest?’
“What? Hell no! Who wants to go to death?” he asked angrily.
And as suddenly came a blinding flash and he was back at the table with his family in Maine, and his father was standing to help Claire into her chair.
“Dad, are you alright?” his daughter said, her voice repeating what the woman on the boat had asked not two minutes ago.
He looked up, startled, still feeling disoriented. He leaned back in his chair and sighed, then shook his head. “You know, I think I’ve eaten too much,” he barely managed to get out.
“You don’t say?” his father shot back sarcastically. “I’m not sure there’s anything you haven’t eaten this morning…”
“The food here was unusually today,” Ted said as he signed the check – over the strenuous objections of Bill Sr.
“Dad?” Tracy asked. “You still driving up to Southwest Harbor tomorrow?”
Ted nodded. “I have an appointment up there at one. They recommended I stop for lunch at a place called Beal’s Lobster Pound. Supposed to be right by the Coast Guard Station. They unload the lobsters right there, come straight from the boat to the plate…with a brief stop for cooking, I suppose.”
Bill Sr. looked from Tracy to Ted. “You have what kind of an appointment, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Boatbuilder. Hinckley. They started making a little runabout called the Picnic Boat a few years ago, and I’d like a decent little boat to use at the new cottage.” His little cottage was in Naples, Florida, and Bill Jr had learned that this little cottage had approximately twenty thousand square feet of living space, and of course had its own boat dock facing Naples Bay. Gordon Pass, the main entry into the bay, was literally just seconds away, and the views were great…
“Sounds fun,” Bill Sr. said. “Mind if I tag along?”
So quite early the next morning everyone skipped the continental breakfast and headed down to their small fleet of rental cars and set off for Acadia National Park; they made it to Beal’s just before noon and they tumbled into the unassuming gray-shingled building only to be confronted by rows of galvanized tubs absolutely crawling with lobsters.
Or bugs, as the locals called them.
There were one pounders and two pounders, and then there were the big ones, then the really really big bugs, and these older, wiser bugs had pushed themselves into the corners of the tanks to better conceal themselves. And a smart looking teen stood behind the counter, waiting for these new arrivals to pick the bug, or bugs, of their choice.
Ted, and as a Texan perhaps this was only predictable, zeroed in on a huge, defiant looking thing and pointed at it. “Is that the biggest you got?”
“It is right now,” the freckle-faced girl behind the counter replied. “You want me to weigh him?”
“Go ahead, if you please.”
The girl reached in and picked up the creature, whose telson, or tail-fan, was now flapping wildly about. Perhaps the creature saw the look of intense delight in Ted’s eyes as the girl said “He’s a four pounder.” And so, with his sentence entered into the proceedings, perhaps the poor creature knew his time had come. Even so, he’d decided he was going to put up a fight.
He lost.
And everyone in turn pronounced sentence on the bug of their choice but for Claire. Ever the empath, she simply could not look an animal in the eye knowing that she was going to kill it and eat it, so she settled for a Cobb Salad with blackened haddock instead.
Bill Jr picked a two pounder, and was stunned by the sheer size of the corn-on-the-cob that came with the large red bug, its back now arched in steamed agony. He carried his paper plate out onto the deck overlooking the picturesque harbor, and the sight of the harbor, and all that food, simply took his breath away. He’d traveled the world and yet he had never been to Maine, let alone this part of the Down East coastline, and right then he was wondering why he hadn’t.
There were several small wooden piers jutting out over the water, none particularly big but each in their turn quite interesting, almost charming. Fishing boats came and went from the fuel dock, while lobstermen unloaded their catch just under the wooden deck where he sat. Gulls flew overhead, hoping to snag an errant morsel that might accidentally fall from one of the tables. The sky was blue, as blue as a bluebird, and little cotton-candy clouds scudded on their way high overhead.
He felt something hit his shoulder and turned to see seagull shit running down his arm. He shook his head then wiped the stuff off with a moistened towelette before turning to his plate.
Ted’s bug had started out a huge, mottled thing of mainly indecipherable colors in the reddish-black range, but now the just-steamed beast was as red as a fire engine. Ted was salivating as he cracked a claw, extracting the meat with a lobster fork and dipping it in freshly melted butter. No one said a word as they feasted on bug meat, steamed corn and new potatoes, and everyone had blueberry soda and a thick slab of blueberry pie with a tennis ball sized scoop of locally made vanilla bean ice cream – before they groaned their way out to their rental cars in bloated agony.
Though the Hinckley yard was nearby, literally just across the small, horseshoe shaped harbor, it took fifteen minutes of fighting through the village’s overcrowded and almost painfully narrow streets to get there. With Ted and the girls in one car and Bill Sr and Claire following, Bill Jr fell in behind them with Ann in the back seat of his car. Tracy, of course, knew a little about the toxic family dynamics of the Tennyson household, yet she’d had no trouble embracing Ann as the sister she’d never known.
And Ann had embraced the role. Indeed, after eighteen years the two of them were chattering away like best friends, because, not too surprisingly, they were. They carried on about how stuffed they were and how they planned to play tennis tomorrow “all day long, or we’ll never fit in our clothes…” Bill cast nervous, sidelong glances at Tracy, and occasionally looked at Ann in the rearview mirror, wondering what the hell had happened to his life. Had All That Hate Been For Nothing?
Claire, for her part, was still fuming, even after so many years had passed, distressed that Tracy had taken to Ann like a duck to water. Jealous didn’t even begin to describe how she felt, yet she’d felt her brother go back to the pink creatures while she was playing the Claire de lune at brunch the day before, so she’d reached out and followed him. She’d found herself on a small street, little more than a paved, one lane track that meandered along a manicured waterfront. She was surrounded by palms and rows of frangipani, fragrant with magenta blossoms, and sloped, grassy lawns that led down to the water’s edge. She’d felt warm under the clear afternoon sun, and it took a moment but she soon recognized this place. Tall reeds topped by lavender blossoms blocked her way to the water, but then she saw a much older Tracy standing just ahead, waving to a man on a sailboat. Black hull, white cove stripe and a green bottom, the sailboat was not a hundred yards offshore and it lay at anchor on calm waters the color of a shallow swimming pool. Then she recognized Bill standing there, though he too appeared much older in this place. He turned and seemed to fall into a seated position in the shade of a protective canvas bimini, and Tracy ran to a small rubber boat and sped out to him…as too did another woman from a nearby sailboat…
“Who is that?” she asked.
…Then one of the pink creatures was beside her, hovering a few feet above the grass. ‘You must return, and quickly,’ the creature thought to her. Tracy nodded, and had instantly returned to the brunch at the Samoset. She had never imagined her brother so old, or so fragile, and the sight had both shocked and depressed her.
Now she turned around and watched him maneuvering the car through the congested village, trying not to run over one of the hordes of tourists walking about as if in a food-coma, yet sure that something important was about to happen.
When the cars had parked at the yard and Ted had disappeared inside the front office, everyone got out and stretched in all their postprandial dismay, with Ann remarking that she was sure she had ‘gained at least ten pounds so far this weekend.’ Bill Sr walked past a few boatsheds down to a long pier, and he began walking out the sloping ramp that led down to where several boats were tied up. His son and daughters and granddaughters followed, though they all walked ponderously – with their lobsters suddenly having the last laugh. Someone farted and everyone turned and pointed at Ann, then Tracy, then everyone laughed nervously. Even Claire.
There were several fancy motorboats tied up out there, as well as two sailboats. A family was loading groceries and other provisions onto one of the sailboats, a pretty red-hulled sloop with the curious name Heist, while the second, almost identical black-hulled sloop, named Argos, lay just beyond. This boat looked brand new, and Bill Sr thought she was drop-dead gorgeous.
And so did Tracy. Ann too.
When Claire saw the boat she flinched and turned away.
And when Bill Jr saw the sailboat he staggered back as if he’d just taken a left hook to the chin.
+++++
“I guess I tripped on something,” he said as he stood and dusted himself off. Tracy took him by one arm and Ann the other, and they helped him over to a nearby bench.
“What happened here, son?” his father said as he walked over to investigate the commotion.
“Nothing, Dad. I think I just, I must’ve tripped on something.”
“Good thing you didn’t fall in the water,” Bill Sr said.
“Why?”
“Well, look over there, would you…?”
Everyone’s eyes shifted to a dark sheltered tidal pool formed by mottled rocks, the black water full of kelp, and then at the large orca there. He must’ve been a male…if the size of his head was any indication…because it seemed massive. And the orca was staring at them, or, more specifically, he was staring at Bill Jr.
“Oh, he seems almost tame,” an old man walking beside Ted said, just as the two men came out to join the group on the pier. “Been here a week or so, too. The tourist boats have been having a field day with him, but he’s just been hanging around near that tidal pool, almost like he was waiting for someone.”
Claire turned and looked at the orca, and the orca’s gaze shifted to hers. “Do they usually come in so close?” she asked.
“No, no they don’t. As a matter of fact I can’t recall one ever hanging around the here this long, and never so close to our pier.” The man with Ted then walked over to one of the motorboats and pointed. “So, Ted, this is the Picnic Boat I told you about,” the old man said as he ushered Ted over to the graceful, deep red hulled motorboat, leaving Bill Jr and Tracy to walk over and admire the black hulled sailboat once again.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” Bill whispered to her.
“She is something,” Tracy replied, “but she’s so big! What do you think, how long?”
“Got to be 40, maybe 45 feet.”
“Remember that Swan we saw last year at the boat show?” she asked.
“Yeah, she was pretty, but…” he said, thinking ‘– in the same way a Ferrari can be pretty. Functional for one thing, impractical for anything but racing.’
“But yeah, she was pretty bad down below. Remember that companionway? It was so steep….it almost felt like a ladder…”
They paced up and down the pier looking at the black-hulled yacht as if entranced, as perhaps they were, until Ted and the old man came back to rejoin the little group.
“What model is this?” Tracy said, pointing to the black-hulled sailboat.
“Oh, that’s a Sou’wester 42. Nice boat, too.”
“How hard is she to sail?” Tracy asked.
“Oh, not very. She’s setup for singlehanded sailing. See the mast? The sail is rolled up inside, and it furls electrically. The foresail furls, too. Everything controlled from the cockpit. Too bad, a sad tale behind this one.”
“Oh?” Ted said. “How’s so?”
“Oh, well, we took the order for her about a year ago. The buyer came up several times while we were building her, made a bunch of requests for modifications. He got it just right, too. Prettiest one we’ve built in a long time, but about two months ago he passed on. Never got to sail her. Damn shame, too. It was like he poured his soul into that boat.”
“So, you mean she’s for sale?” Ted asked.
“Oh, yeah, actively, though we just listed her a few days ago. We wanted to get her into the water and fully commissioned before we brought her to market.”
Bill Jr walked over and looked at the yacht’s name again. Argos. ‘Now where do I know that from?’ he asked himself. He looked to Claire because he was sure she’d know, and now she was looking at him, then the sailboat, so he walked over to her. “Argos? I can’t remember where I know that name from.”
She smiled, shook her head. “The Odyssey? Odysseus’s faithful dog? When he returns home to Ithaca he comes disguised as a beggar, but Argos recognizes him despite the passage of time, and his disguise. And as soon as this faithful companion knows his master is still alive he promptly dies.”
“That’s it. I remember now, Miss Tompkin’s classics class, wasn’t it? Argos is faithful while Penelope has been, well, besieged with suitors, and no one recognizes Odysseus…”
Tracy was standing by her father, whispering in his ear, then Ted turned to the old man.
“How much for both of ‘em?” Ted asked.
And without missing a beat the old man looked at Ted, then at Tracy, then he nodded his head knowingly and smiled. “Well, let’s go up to the office and run some numbers.”
+++++
Ted sat across from Bill Jr at dinner that night, just the two of them for their last night at the lodge. He seemed amiable enough, but as soon as he’d ordered a Jack Daniels, neat, he turned serious.
“Look, Bill, I need you to take some time off from work. Say a month, maybe six weeks, and help me bring that Picnic Boat down to Florida. I’ve got the route all mapped out, and I’d like to leave in August…”
“Ted, that’s right in the middle of hurricane season…”
“Yeah, but that boat can outrun a hurricane, and anyway, I have no intention of going offshore. Just marina to marina, one day at a time, taking the ICW most of the way.”
“All August?”
“Yup.”
“Ted, Doris is starting her last year. Don’t you think I should be home for that?”
“Oh, don’t give me that crap. She’s eighteen and tough as a boot. Besides, you look like you could use some time away from all that estrogen.”
Bill laughed a that, but he was also a little taken aback by all that had happened during this last day, and it must’ve shown.
“Next, I want to talk about Argos.”
“Okay,” Bill said, still a little flummoxed that Ted had bought a sailboat, too.
“She’s going to be documented in an LLC, but in our names. You, me, and Tracy. It’s just a tactic, a way to pass her on to you two. Depreciate, then depreciate some more, avoid all those inheritance and gift taxes, but she’s yours now. Yours and Tracy’s. I made arrangements to keep the boat at the marina up there in Southwest Harbor for the rest of the season, then they’ll put her in heated storage over the winter. I’ll assume by next year you can make all your own arrangements, because I know you two will have your hands full for the rest of this summer.”
“Yessir, I imagine so.” His heart was racing now.
“Item two. Tracy tells me you’re thinking of retiring soon.”
Bill nodded his head. “Yessir?”
“What are your plans, assuming you do retire?”
“I’ve got a standing offer at Raytheon, another at Orbital Sciences.”
“Give up flying? You sure you want to do that?”
“No sir, I’m not at all sure I want to do that, but TWA ain’t exactly breaking any revenue records right now, if you know what I mean…”
Ted snorted. “Oh, hell, that story was written a long time ago. TWA will be snapped up within months, maybe a year, and probably by United but maybe American. You could stay on with one of those, of course, but…”
“But the L-1011 is being phased out. Delta is the only other major carrier still using them, but they’re getting old.”
“So if you’re going to keep flying you’d need to get a new type rating.”
“I know,” he said with a nod. “And that would mean losing seniority, and that means losing the flexibility I’ll need…”
“You do know, of course, that Orbital Sciences bought a TriStar a couple of years ago?”
“Yes, I heard something about that.”
“You might be able to do both, you know? Engineering, while still keeping a hand in the cockpit.”
“Yessir.”
“Ah, I see you’ve already thought of that.”
Bill nodded. “Everything going on there is classified right now, but yes, I’d have to go down to Patuxent, go through test pilot training.”
“Sounds right up your alley, Bill.”
“Yessir. I, uh, really don’t know what to say about Argos, sir.”
“Look, Bill, you can call me Ted. You can even call me Dad if that floats your boat, but please, knock it off with the ‘Sir’ stuff, okay?”
Bill nodded. “I’ll try. Ted.”
+++++
Ted and Bill made their trip south, and despite the dissimilar trajectories of their lives they got along well enough before the trip even began and so seemed destined to become fast friends. They left Southwest Harbor on a crisp summer morning, taking the old white lighthouse on Great Duck Island to port, anchoring out their first night out in Burnt Coat Harbor on Swan’s Island. The next day was brutal, with a fresh wind out of the northeast bringing whitecaps and a seasick-inducing roll that saw both men leaning over the rail, feeding the fish the remnants of their breakfast. On the advice of the old man at Hinckley, they ducked into the Fox Island Thoroughfare and anchored in a deep, protected cove just across from the village of North Haven. Taking the Zodiac dingy to the rocky shore. Both men jumped out of the dingy and fell to the ground as soon as they reached land, wanting to embrace anything that was rolling…and heaving. After putting down a fair measure of single malt, and with nothing to eat save a few saltines, they slept the sleep of the dead that night.
And his dream returned.
Leaning on the coaming of the sailboat, he suddenly knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was on Argos, and the boat had to be anchored somewhere in French Polynesia. The woman on the sailboat next to his called out again, “Dad, are you okay?” and he looked, realized it was his daughter Doris on the sailboat she had bought in Seattle years ago. She had retired when she was in her 30s and had a chunky, almost indestructible 37 footer and she had singlehanded down the Pacific coast to Cabo, then jumped to the Marquesas. She had met up with them when Argos arrived in Tahiti after a long passage from Panama City, Panama.
Then the memory of it all grew clear. He and Tracy were on their second circumnavigation. They’d gone east-around their first time around, going to Nova Scotia, then Scandinavia and the Baltic before taking the shortcut to the Mediterranean through the canals of France. East to the Suez then the Red Sea, the Maldives and Sri Lanka before hitting Phuket and Singapore on their way to Japan. With some difficulty they had sailed through inland seas and deep inlets all the way to Hiroshima.
In his dream now he found himself there with the pink creature once again by his side. The city looked beaten down and war torn and she had pointed to the sky, to the three silver bombers approaching the city. He had stared at the aircraft knowing that his father was in one of them, and that the bomb that he saw falling was going to be cataclysmic, rupturing not just atoms but the shape of all their futures. Then a bright flash and the pressure wave that followed. The raging fires, the sundered lives, death everywhere – and when the pink creature turned and looked at him just then he saw the question in her eyes.
‘You knew of this, yet you followed your father and began working to make these weapons even more devastating.’
He had nodded and in the next instant found himself back on Argos, back in the Gambier Island Group, anchored off the village of Rikitea on Mangareva Island, and he knew he was having a stroke.
+++++
Doris graduated high school at the top of her class and went on to NYU. Evelyn struggled to compete in her sister’s shadow, though Bill tried to manage her ego while wrapping up his career at TWA. After Doris left for college he spent more time with Evelyn, took her sailing on Argos and even took her flying a few times, yet she seemed to lack something he thought of as curiosity. She seemed to live entirely in the moment and so had little regard for the past or her future. She watched movies of the moment, car chases and dinosaurs seemed to grab her attention while nothing in school ever did. She graduated from high school and had no interest in college; indeed, she had no interest in leaving home. She began to overeat, to get fat while she refused to clean up after herself, and he had to process that. Somehow she had come of age in the shadow of a beautiful mother and a brainy sister and rather than compete she had withered into this brittle thing, what he considered a shell of a human being.
When he no longer knew what to do, and after it became apparent that even Tracy had reached her wit’s end, he did the only thing he knew to do.
He called Claire.
“I wondered when you’d asked,” was almost the first thing she said when he called.
“You did?”
“She’s a lost soul, Junior Birdman.”
“You know I hate it when you call me that.”
“And that’s precisely why I do.”
“Look, can you give me some insights?” he asked.
“Sure. Send her to me for the summer.”
“Oh, God no. Really? What are you going to do to her?”
A week later Evelyn boarded an American flight to San Francisco, and as he watched her plane take off from the upper deck of the parking garage at Logan he felt sad, a defeated failure.
+++++
Ted was at the helm, bill standing up on the Picnic Boat’s foredeck waiting to throw a line to the boy on the dock. When he heaved the line the boy grabbed it and made it fast to a cleat on the stone quay, then Ted jump off and took the stern line to a bollard. A few minutes later, Ted’s Picnic Boat was tied off in Ego Alley, a narrow inlet off Annapolis Harbor where the city docks were located. Bill was soon tripping down memory lane, staring at the Halsey Field House about a hundred yards from where he stood, lost in echoes of his time as a Midshipman at the Naval Academy.
They spent five days tied up in Annapolis, one afternoon at the Preble looking at ship models and two days at a dermatologist’s office getting skin cancers diagnosed and removed from Ted’s nose and ears. The finally took off down the Chesapeake with Ted sporting a variety of bandages on his face and with Bill trying out a variety of sunscreens.
After slipping through Norfolk in deep fog, with the docked row of aircraft carriers silhouetted in the sunrise, the Hinckley turned off the main artery of the Intra-Coastal Waterway and entered the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, the nation’s oldest manmade waterway and George Washington’s first public infrastructure project, and they both looked back at their experience in the trees as one of the highlights of the trip. Sailboats, fellow travelers along the migration route, motored along with their masts brushing through the overhanging trees, the deep brown tannin rich waters of their bow waves staining their prows, in effect marking their passage through the canal.
Staying overnight in Wrightsville Beach, grazing on seafood and ice cold beer until the wee hours, talking with fellow cruisers about the known hazards just ahead and many of them commiserating with Ted and showing off their own scars from skin cancer. Shrimp and grits in Charleston, South Carolina, walking among the gardens in Savannah, Georgia, getting a too close for comfort look at nuclear submarine at St Mary’s inlet just before they reached Florida.
After their time on the water was at an end, Bill began to look back on their passage as an interlude, perhaps not so peaceful but enlightening. He’d picked a battered copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha at a used book store in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and he’d started to see his journey with Ted as a mystical series of encounters with others they met along their path.
The disgruntled newly retired millionaire on his big Hatteras complaining about everything he’d seen and everyone he’d met on his months long journey. The kids with almost nothing to their name but their dilapidated old sailboat who were having the time of their young lives. The sun-broiled almost ancient hands of fishermen they met in the middle of the Chesapeake who asked if they wanted some fish, the lobster pots in Maine blocking every channel. And everywhere, the U.S. Coast Guard, always helpful, sometimes menacing, but seemingly ever-present. So many juxtaposed worldviews, a world of incongruent expectation.
They’d cut across Florida, taking the Hinckley from Stuart through the Okeechobee Waterway to Fort Myers, then the last thirty miles just off the sugary white beaches on their way to Naples. And Ted’s cottage off Gordon Pass overlooking Naples Bay had lived up to Tracy’s description. Huge, almost garish, the architect had obviously been from South Miami Beach, with pink and white the predominant colors on the exterior and the interior a riot of senseless pastels and randomly scattered rooms, all this in one discordant pile of white tile that just screamed FLORIDA. Bill had smiled his muted approval until he stumbled across a swimming pool right where he’d expected to find the dining room, and then he saw that the kitchen was sunken to the same level, and that also shared a long glass wall with the pool. “So,” he said to Ted, “you can cook breakfast in there and serve it at that counter there, right there in the pool?”
Ted beamed and replied that it saved time that way.
Bill flew back to Boston in time to help Doris to her dorm in New York City, and found out he’d been accepted in the test pilot program at Patuxent River NAS, and as suddenly he realized that time did indeed possess vastly different textures, just like Ted’s sprawling cottage. Perspectives differed in one kind of time versus another. Everything about the world had slowed down out there on the water with Ted, but now that he was home he was back inside the perpetual motion machine of modern life, always moving purposefully towards something which often turned out to be nothing at all, all the while never just enjoying the moment. Another year passed, another year with the family at the Samoset in Maine, and he’d looked at his life, and Ted’s, and looked at the results of living in their shared perpetual motion machine.
Did he really want to end up there? Always taking time for granted, never living in the moment? He reread Clavell’s Shōgun, dwelling on Mariko-san’s descriptions of making time stand still, of learning to watch a rock grow, about Wa, or harmony, and when he looked at his daughter Doris he saw echoes of her grandfather, and yet with a start he recognized his mother and Ann lurking inside his own flesh and blood. Evelyn happier while Doris was turning into a psychopath… ‘Oh,’ he wondered as he tried to find sleep that night, ‘what did I do…?’
‘Maybe it’s just genetics?’ he usually told himself, trying to let himself off the hook.
Evelyn had come back from San Francisco in time for the family’s trip to Maine and she had seemed different, happier those first few days on Argos. Changed, almost happy. But after a few days around Doris all the resentment blossomed and flowered and took root again, and Evelyn usually sat up on the foredeck, her legs dangling off the deck as she stared off into infinity. Until one day, anchored in Smith Cove, just east of Castine, Maine. The cruising guide mentioned that Captain John Smith – of Pocahontas fame – had anchored in the cove to ride out a storm during his second sojourn in the colonies, when he was mapping the northern New England coastline in some detail. As she sat staring down into the black water, she noticed a rippling at her feet and almost screamed when a small orca appeared.
Bill had seen the two of them, Evie and the orca, and quietly took a picture of the moment. He eventually gave a copy of the photograph to a friend who painted landscapes, and she gave him an impressionist’s interpretation of the moment. As soon as he had it framed, the painting graced the saloon bulkhead above Argos’ varnished teak table.
That evening, after her encounter with the orca, Evelyn asked her dad if the two of them could talk. “In private,” she’d said.
So they had made their excuses and jumped in the Zodiac and puttered over to Sheep Island, right in the middle of the cove, and they found some rocks and watched the sunset as a couple of big schooners sailed into the cove. Bill found the sight of the old sailing ships jarring, even as packed to the rafters with tourists as they were. Relics of an extinct era, as the two schooners dropped anchor time had seemed to turn inward on itself, and as the evening gave way to night shifting amber reflections of oil lamps on the water fought with the stars for their place in the here and now.
“Dad?”
“Yo.”
“I want to go to school in San Francisco this year.”
He swallowed hard, not sure how to handle this one, but he thought Tracy needed to be in on this conversation. “Oh?” he did just manage to say.
“I need to spend more time with Aunt Claire, and I really like it out there. I feel like I fit in.”
“How so.”
“Well, for one thing Claire is teaching me the piano, and I’m really getting into it.”
“And?”
“I like the people out there. Boston is so…uptight and strait-laced…and I’ve never felt more alive than when I’m out there.”
“Have you talked to your mother about this?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, and he gathered it wasn’t because she was cold. “I can’t talk to her, Dad.” She sighed, looked into the water and he thought she looked lost in time, like she didn’t belong in this time. “I guess I’ve never been able to,” she added quietly.
“Yet you can talk to me? Am I that big of a pushover, Kiddo?”
“No.” Again, the hesitation. Time, on a precipice. Then: “Mom has never loved me, Dad. I know you don’t look at it that way, but…”
“Oh, come on, Evie, I don’t know how you can say that…”
“Because Claire showed me, Dad.”
He looked down, now utterly defeated. There was no reason to put on airs, no reason to deny it. Claire had violated her oath and taken his daughter over the threshold… “I see,” he finally whispered, clearly wrestling with the implications. “Where else have you been?”
“In the operating room when I was born. Right after you passed out. Mom screaming how much she hated me right there in front of all those doctors and nurses. All of Dories birthday parties when Mom told her that she was her secret favorite. All the times when you weren’t around, Dad, when you were off in London and Paris or God knows where else, when Dorie and I got in arguments and Mom took her side. Dad, she always took her side. And you never saw that. You never saw a thing those two did to me.”
“I don’t know what to say, Kiddo. I really don’t, because sorry seems inadequate…”
She looked at him and nodded. “Apology accepted, Dad. You know, Claire says we see what we want to see. Even when things are nothing at all like what we think. We delude ourselves, we chase our illusions until we finally reach the moment of our final reality. The reality we can’t deny any longer.”
The frothy weightlessness of summer had just vanished, the timelessness of being on vacation was gone now, vanished on sylvan breezes borne on yesterday’s passing, carried away on the gossamer wings of denial. “And what do you think I’ve been denying?” he said.
“Dorie has always been Mom’s favorite. I’m think I’m yours, or will be yours, because I think you can relate to the things I had to put up with Ann, and maybe with your mom and dad. And I think because sometime you kinda resent Mom.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“I think so, Kiddo.”
“I think you also think that Doris is becoming more and more like Ann, and that scares you.”
Some people from one of the schooners rowed over to the island with a fire pit and some logs, and they invited Bill and Evie to come and makes s’mores with them. They sat with these strangers under the stars and everyone talked and laughed and then laid back and listened to the snaps and pops of the fire until there was nothing left but the red glow of fading embers, and only then was it time to head back to Argos.
Tracy was asleep when he went in to check on her and then he realized it was after one in the morning; he grimaced and shook his head, then grabbed a blanket and a pillow and went topsides to sleep in the cockpit. He saw Evie on the foredeck again, talking to someone in the water.
He decided he really didn’t want to know.
+++++
But he was back in time for his next ride on the perpetual motion machine. Putting in for his retirement from TWA, making sure that all the necessary retirement accounts he’d set up over the years were ready to receive his retirement and pension payments. Yet even before all this was finalized he was working at Orbital Sciences, developing satellite payload delivery systems.
And taking Doris back to New York before getting on the long flight to San Francisco with Evie. It was easier this way, enrolling her in school out there, setting up a bank account for her – an account that he could access and monitor because she was still a minor. He went down to check in with his dad and they played a round or two and shared war stories with a bottle of single malt. For the first time he could recall his father talked about that day, that early morning over Hiroshima, and he finally understood why his father drank so much.
He never mentioned the things he and Evie had talked about, nor did he mention this to Tracy. Those feelings of Evelyn’s, he knew, had to remain locked away, for now anyway. He loved Tracy and Doris and he always would, but he told himself that maybe some secrets are better left hidden away.
Even after he’d retired from TWA he managed to keep his hands on a TriStar, because the company had adapted the L-1011 to carry a small rocket on it’s belly and once at altitude launch a small payload to orbit. As this was a relatively new technology he’d needed to attend test pilot school just to learn the appropriate testing protocols, but he found the process exhilarating, especially go through live launches.
Because, he admitted to Tracy one night while they watched Letterman on late night, flying was still the bees knees to him, one of the things that had given meaning to his life. She had felt somewhat dismayed by the remark because in 25 years together he’d never once said that, yet despite the lingering sting she thought she understood what he meant.
So many secrets. She wondered what else he was keeping from her.
But as they sat there one beside one the other in that cathode glow, she understood now that they both had so much to unlearn.
Would there be time, she wondered?
+++++
Claire called just a few weeks after Bill returned to Boston. Their father had passed earlier that afternoon, and of course while playing golf, so at least he’d died happy. She recounted a friends version of events, of how he’d simply stepped out of his golf cart on the eighteenth fairway, chipped up to the green on his way to a solid birdie, then dropped where he stood. No warning signs, in perfect health – for his age, anyway. As in: here one minute and gone the next.
Or, as in: Time. Just. Stopped. For William Tennyson Sr, anyway.
Everyone flew to LA for the service, and then the next day, Bill, who was the executor of his father’s estate, read the old man’s last will and testament. Out loud to his sisters at their father’s insistence, in the presence of Bill Sr’s attorney. All assets to be liquidated and divided equally between Doris and Evelyn, yet those funds to remain In Trust, untouched until his granddaughters reached 35 years of age. Only one exception: a medical emergency with no other way to provide for care. Claire and Bill could have cared less, but Ann was livid. Bill smelled trouble, then he remembered his father’s final admonishment concerning her: Never. Trust. Ann.
And the three siblings left the lawyer’s office with no apparent ill-will, yet Bill smelled the lingering financial animosities trailing in Ann’s personal perfume. Which was, when all was said and done, exactly what his father had told him to expect. But the Will was an iron-clad instrument perfectly executed, so he would have to play another game of Wait and See with Ann, endure one last snake-dance with her before he could finally be done with her.
Because, in truth, he wanted to be done with her.
He remained at the house in Pasadena to get it in order and ready to list, and after the movers had cleared out the things Ann and Claire wanted, he went upstairs to his old bedroom and stood in the empty room looking around, remembering the time he had spent there. His room had been trapped between his parent’s room and Ann’s, so he had been a non-stop witness to his mother’s screaming infidelities and his sister’s innate depravity.
Then looking at the room’s built-in bookshelves he found a Playboy from 1968 still lingering in all its dust-bound glory, one that Claire had somehow missed, and he smiled, then went up to the attic to look around. The emptiness smelled of cedar shingles and cardboard boxes full of unused Christmas tree ornaments, like a warehouse full of forgotten things and broken dreams. He wondered where his prized collection of Playmates was going to end up – in a landfill, perhaps, or maybe stashed under some other teenager’s bed, just waiting for one more call to duty?
For a moment he thought he could hear his mother and father fighting and then his father running away one more time, doing exactly what his mother had wanted him to so she could carry on with her secret dalliances, then he remembered his father coming back after his mother had fled, the quiet sounds he’d made sneaking into Ann’s room. Suddenly he felt guilty as he wondered how Ann was coping with her release now that he was finally gone. Maybe she’d finally be able to let go, but the last few times they’d been together in Maine he’d seen the look in her eyes. She didn’t want revenge, she’d wanted retribution. And that left him with a sour feeling in his gut.
Claire, on the other hand, still had issues with Ann and disliked being anywhere near her. That would never change, but he had to wonder given the things Evie had told him.
A few months later, just before summer, Tracy and Bill moved Argos to a marina south of Providence, Rhode Island, which allowed them to take her out on weekends from April to October, usually on long weekends. Tracy remained at TWA until it was absorbed by American Airlines, and then found herself at loose ends. American offered her a job at their flight academy in Dallas training new hires at the flight attendant school, but in truth she was ready to move on. During the family’s next summer on Argos, one evening they were at anchor in a small cove opposite the village of North Haven, just off the well-traveled Fox Island Thoroughfare, Doris and Tracy engaged in rinsing off several bugs they had just bought from passing lobstermen, when Doris asked her mom what she was going to do now that she was at a crossroads.
“You’d make a great teacher, Mom. It wouldn’t take you long to get certified.”
“No interest,” her mom sighed as she turned to fill an eight quart stockpot with seawater and white wine. She set the pot on a burner and tossed tarragon and basil into the water, then leaned against the galley counter waiting for the water to come to a boil. “The fact of the matter, Doris, is that I’m tired of the grind, of the rat race, and I’m really really tired of your father being away all the time…”
And Bill was at that moment in the 42s aft stateroom, almost upside down with his head in the engine compartment, struggling to close a balky raw-water intake so he could clean out the raw-water strainer, and even though the door to the stateroom was closed his head was just a few inches from where Tracy stood, and he could hear every word said in the galley, even those things Tracy might not have wanted him to hear.
So, he listened and he suddenly realized that all things must come to an end. Even the best things, the things he had so often taken for granted. He sat up and looked around the Hinckley’s stateroom, then sighed as the moment passed.
Then he felt a soft bump against the hull, and then the clicks of a nearby orca calling it’s pod.
IV. Winter
“Four-zero Sierra Charlie, you are clear to land on runway one-five, wind one-niner-five at one-two, ceiling five hundred with light rain, report on the localizer.”
“S-L-F 4-0-Sierra-Charlie has the localizer, clear to land 1-5,” Tennyson said. He had been the pilot in command this morning for the launch of the latest Pegasus air-launched multistage rocket. Slung beneath the belly of an L-1011 built in 1974, Pegasus was carried to flight level 3-9-0, 39,000 feet above the Atlantic, and towards the rocket’s orbital insertion heading – preparing for countdown and release. Tense minutes passed as range safety officers made sure all commercial traffic had been vectored out of the rocket’s trajectory, and as all the systems onboard Pegasus were still in the green. He listened intently as the countdown reached T-minus 4:00minutes, preparing the cockpit for launch, then he tensed as the final ten seconds counted down. At “Zero!” the rocket dropped approximately 500 feet and Tennyson had gently banked the TriStar to the right and descended out of the rocket’s flight path, then he turned the aircraft so onboard sensors could track the vehicle as it ascended. He heard clapping and applause a few minutes later so knew they had a good bird. This morning’s launch had taken place off from the Canary Islands and the Orbital Sciences crew had celebrated another successful launch. In control rooms behind the cockpit and on the ground mission controllers monitored the placement of satellites while Tennyson and the flight crew flew back to and prepared to land at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility on Merritt Island, just north of Port Canaveral, Florida.
He watched glide-slope capture on the flight director, nodded in satisfaction as the autopilot corrected for a little down-draft, then as the auto throttle maintained speeds right on the correct descent profile, but at 1500 feet MSL, or above mean sea level, he switched off the AP and took the controls.
“Flaps thirty,” he said to his FO for this flight, Tom Collins.
“Thirty.”
“Gear down.”
They listened as the nose gear whirred and clunked, then waited for the three green lights on the panel that indicated proper extension. The noise level in the cockpit increased as the nose gear significantly increased the TriStar’s drag through the slipstream.
“Three green,” Collins said.
They quickly ran through their last pre-landing checklist even as Tennyson flew the last seconds of the approach through dense clouds and rain, the high intensity runway lights coming into view about ten seconds before touchdown. When the mains hit spoilers popped up from the upper surface of the TriStar’s wings and Tennyson applied even pressure to the brakes with his toes, and then he allowed the aircraft to slow gently through 80 knots before cleaning the wing. There were no taxiways here, just a straight runway leading to a small turnout where families usually waited to greet returning Space Shuttles. Just beyond that small apron Orbital Sciences maintained a hangar for the L-1011, and Tennyson taxied to the ramp in front of the hangar and then ran through the TriStar’s shut-down sequence while ground carts attached umbilicals. An truck mounted air-stair drove up to the port forward door and within a few minutes most of the people had de-planed. Most, except the flight crew. Now came the endless paperwork required by NASA to document all phases of their flight, and this took another hour – as the ground carts underneath the aircraft provided the power needed to run the air conditioning and electronics.
After a night in a Marriott in Cocoa Beach, he drove up to Jacksonville and hopped on a Delta flight to Atlanta the next morning, then another going to Boston. Tracy was on the telephone as he walked into the old walkup on Chestnut Street, and she looked pale, almost terrified, as she listened to the voice on the other end.
Bill immediately put his suitcase down and walked over to her, and he sat beside her as she looked up at him, tears in her eyes and unspoken grief fluttering over her like the wings of dark angels.
“He just walked in. Could I let you talk to my husband now?”
She handed the telephone to him, the long coiled cord dangling across her lap. “Bill Tennyson here,” he said calmly.
“A-ah, Mr Tennyson, this is Detective Harwood, NYPD Homicide. I understand you were not home the past week? Is that correct, sir?”
“That is, but what’s going on?”
“Where were you last night, Mr Tennyson?”
“Let me rephrase my last question, in case you didn’t understand what I said. What the hell is going on?”
Tennyson could hear the man scribbling notes, then: “Uh, is Miss Ann Tennyson your sister?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Mr Tennyson, she was found earlier this morning in an alley near Central Park. She was taken to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead. That was at five thirty eight this morning. Could you tell me where you were at that time, sir?”
“I was leaving the Marriott Courtyard in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to catch a flight home.”
“What were you doing down there?”
“Launching a rocket.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have any suspects or leads, Detective?”
“Nothing solid, sir.”
“Where is my sister now?”
“The Medical Examiner’s, sir. Will you be coming down?”
“Yes, as soon as I can get some things together and repack. Could I have a number to call to get the information I’ll need…”
He listened and took notes after Tracy handed him a notepad, then he scribbled furiously until he hung up the phone. He shook his head then dialed Doris down in her dorm at NYU.
“Dad? Is that you?” she groaned, just waking up at two in the afternoon…
“Yes, Sleepyhead, it sure is. Your mother and I are coming down as soon as we can get to the airport. Something’s happened to your Aunt Ann. You get yourself together and we’ll call you when we get to LaGuardia.”
Doris was wide awake now. “Dad? What’s happened?”
“We’ll talk when we see you. We’ll pick you up outside of the dorm.”
He rang off and stood, then turned to his wife and shook his head. “How long will it take you to get ready?” he asked.
“Give me five minutes. Want me to throw some things in your suitcase?”
“Please. I need to get some reservations going.”
She nodded and walked to get his suitcase on the way to their bedroom, then he took out his Amex Platinum Card and dialed the Concierge Services number on the back of the card.
He listened to the girl run through her canned greeting impatiently, then let go: I have a family emergency in New York City. I’m in Boston and need to fly into LGA, get a rental car and I’ll need a suite at the Marriott in Soho for a week.” He gave her his card number and listened while she got to work; she had everything prepared within five minutes, and she read off his confirmation numbers while he wrote. Tracy came out of their bedroom as he hung up from calling for a taxi, and he helped her carry her suitcase down to the street. Twenty five minutes after walking in his front door he was on the way out, though his gut was churning now.
When they made it to the Crown Room Lounge at Logan he called the same girl at Amex again.
“I don’t know if you can do this,” he began, “but do you know those new Motorola Flip-phones?”
“Yessir?”
“Could you arrange for me to pick three of them up when I get to the Marriott?”
“Yessir. I’ll have them there for you when you arrive.”
“You are an angel. Thanks a million.”
He rang off and grabbed some coffee and some kind of cinnamon roll that seemed to have been baked at a factory in Scranton Pennsylvania maybe five years ago, then they walked out to their plane and boarded. Fifty minutes later they walked out of the grim businessman’s shuttle and made their way to the rental counter, and soon they were approaching the dank warrens of midtown Manhattan.
And Bill was frantically trying to remember the best way to the university.
And failing.
Again.
“Tracy? You remember the way?”
His wife smiled…the great navigator had lost his way. Again.
“Get off on the FDR, go through the South Street Viaduct, then get off on Canal Street.”
“ How do you remember that crap!” he snarled as someone cut him off. “God, I hate this fucking city,” he snarled as he fought his way through snarling hordes of kamikaze taxi drivers to Washington Square, and there was Doris, standing just outside the entrance to Lipton Hall.
Doris waved when she saw her mom then hopped into the Lincoln’s back seat.
“What’s the best way to the Marriott,” he growled without even saying hello.
Hiding her disappointment, she navigated them away from Washington Square the few short blocks to the Marriott. There was no one to help with their luggage and no valet, so he drove around until he found a garage and was stunned to see the rates.
“Eight-five dollars a day?” he screamed at the attendant. “You happen to know where the parking is for the Marriott?”
“They validate,” the bored Sikh woman behind the glass said, stifling a yawn.
He stomped back to the lobby and Amex had taken care of all his check-in paperwork, and as he finished in a sales rep from Bell Telephone came up and introduced himself, then helped them activate their new phones, and he had their new numbers ready, too. After the rep showed them how to call each other, the man smiled at Doris on his way out, and Bill called the Detective Bureau to check-in Detective Harwood, who was by now off-duty. His call was transferred to a Detective Washburn, who advised he would be en-route to their hotel to speak with them. After the cop hung up he dialed Claire’s number at the Sea Cliff house and Evie picked up the phone.
“Hi Pops! What’s cookin’?”
Oh dear God, he thought, she been in California too long. “Get Claire, would you?”
She came on a moment later. “Bill? What’s wrong?”
“I’m in New York. Ann’s been murdered.”
A long pause followed. “You need us to come?”
“Yeah, you have something to write with? Okay, here’s your flight information.”
He rode up the elevator in silence then walked straight to the suite’s living room and sat to let his brain take a moment off. He looked up, saw that the suite had a huge terrace and now sun was settling over the Hudson. The sky was clear, aside from the few stray clouds over the western horizon, and when Tracy brought him a glass of sparkling water he took it gratefully and looked at her as she sat on his lap.
“You doing okay?” she asked carefully.
He shook his head. “No. I am flat out exhausted, Tracy…and running on empty doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel. I didn’t sleep well last night, and, well, I have a bad feeling about this whole thing.”
“You…what thing?”
He shook his head as he sighed. “Oh, hell, maybe I’m just tired. Let me lean back and shut my eyes for a minute. Come get me when that cop gets here…”
She got off his lap and it seemed like he was asleep before she’d made it to her feet, so she and Doris went and unpacked their suitcases in one of the three bedrooms. Once in the room Tracy closed the door and she began filling in the blanks, telling Doris what little they knew so far…
And Doris seemed to fall back a little when she heard the news, then she stepped back and went to a window, looked at the sun setting and the lights in Jersey sitting winking on. She then looked down before she turned and looked at her mother. “I knew something like this was going to happen her, Mom…”
“What? Why?”
“Don’t tell Dad, but I think she was into some really dark stuff…”
“Dark stuff? What on earth do you mean by that, Dorie?”
“I mean,” she began, but then she looked away – as if she had just re-entered a demon-haunted world – and she walked over to a little armchair and sat. “Mom, Ann was into a really strange scene. I mean S&M, Mom, real kinky shit…”
A suddenly wide-eyed Tracy blanched and stumbled back into a chair. “Dorie? What are you saying? You’ve got to be kidding…” Then she took a deep breath as the next most obvious question came to her. “Doris? How do you know? Did she tell you about it?”
Doris nodded. “She told me. Then she convinced me to come with her to a few of the scenes she went, and I think it was someplace she regularly went, I guess.”
“How many times did you go, Doris?”
“Just once, and I left as soon as I saw what was going down…”
And just then her father walked into the room, his eyes like focused lasers beams, his malignant fury now focused on his daughter.
“Do you know anything about this, Doris? About what happened?”
“No, Dad. All that happened last year. I knew it was dangerous, and I…”
“Dangerous?” he said, his grumbling, almost feral voice taking complete charge of the room. “How was it dangerous?”
“There were powerful people there, Dad. I mean Rich. Like rich beyond your wildest dreams, and Ann told me these men do what they want. Anything they want, Dad.”
“Are you saying they kill people at these scenes?” he growled. “For kicks?”
She shook her head. “No, but I saw an altar there Dad. It looked like maybe they were sacrificing animals there, but Ann it was mainly for sex…”
“Do any of these people know you, Doris? Know you, as in know they where you live, or what you do?”
She nodded. “Maybe,” she said, her voice weak, now far away and almost beyond his grasp. “Why?”
Tracy looked at him yet right now his face was a mask, his emotions locked away, out of sight. “Bill? What are you thinking?”
The suite’s doorbell chimed. “That’ll be the homicide detective, Doris.” He was staring at her now with unbridled anger roiling his features, but he turned his attention to his wife as he started for the door. “You two stay in here. Doris? You will not say a word about any of this until I knew more. Not to another soul. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, Dad. I understand.”
‘This is a nightmare,’ he said to himself as he turned and walked out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind as he walked across the suite to the door, ‘and I am so ready to wake up now…’
+++++
He took a taxi to Liberty International in Newark to pick up Claire and Evelyn, and by that point it was past midnight and he was beyond exhausted. They were, however, the first off their United 767 and luckily their bags were among the first to pop out of the chute and onto the revolving carousel, and they were back at the Marriott by two in the morning. Claire and Evie were, of course, on California time so weren’t even remotely tired. The first thing they did was to call room service, and Claire ordered piles of club sandwiches and gallons of coffee.
She assumed it would be a long night, and this gave Bill time to go over the day’s events in his mind, and to process what Doris had just told him. In a way, he told himself as he looked back over her life, Ann’s demise was almost predictable. Ann had always been sexually manipulative so sadomasochism must have seemed like the next step to her. She could manipulate men to her heart’s content in that setting, and who knows, maybe every head she fucked with actually enjoyed it.
‘But…what if she went too far?’ he asked himself. ‘Or what if she tried to extort someone?’
That might have set things in motion, events beyond her control. He shook his head when he remembered how all her seductions had been about control. About getting what she wanted.
‘But doesn’t everyone do just that…in one way or another? Don’t we always seek to control the narrative, even if that involves challenging our moral compasses?’ Again and again his mind sifted through memories of her, how she’d routinely set Claire up to take the fall and she’d willfully lied and distorted the truth to achieve her ends, and her means always justified her ends, achieving control over their father. But if she was involved with the very powerful, which was more than possible in this city, what might have happened to her if she crossed the line, violated a taboo? What if…
‘What if…what if…what if…what we need are facts…’ he muttered out loud.
Claire was sitting beside him now, watching him, but he’d been so lost in his thoughts he hadn’t seen her.
“What facts, Bill?”
“Oh, hell, you’d better let Doris tell you. My mind is a mush right now.”
“You look tired.”
He nodded, leaned back in the patio chair and sighed.
Claire looked at Doris while her brother drifted off, and as she recounted all she’d told her parents Claire began to feel sorry for the girl, sorry for her falling into Ann’s orbit, and sorry for where this journey had taken the family, because one more time Ann was controlling the families dynamic. Even in death.
She that she had seen Bill distancing himself from Doris, and that couldn’t happen. Doris had always been bright and an extrovert, but what would happen to the girl if her father emotionally abandoned her? Yet even as she spoke, as she recounted some of the powerful people Ann had told her participated in these things, another thought entered her mind. What if Doris was lying now. What if she had been involved in more than she was telling them now. If that was true, and if Doris was a know associate of Ann’s, what immediate danger might she conceivably be in.
Claire looked from her brother to his wife, and she felt a sort of cool detachment coming from Tracy, like she was only mildly interested in all this, and – just perhaps – she thought that Bill was blowing this out of all proportion, coming down to hard when a soft touch might be more productive.
Claire, on the other hand, thought nothing of the sort. As she listened to and watched Doris recount the things Ann had allegedly told her, something wasn’t ringing true.
And in a flash, Claire suddenly felt danger lurking everywhere around them, and then she realized she had the moment they’d left the airport in Newark. Tracy, she reminded herself, had always considered Doris her favorite, and acting in loco parentis with Evelyn, she understood such inherent bias led to extremely unpredictable outcomes. Tracy had always been cute – like Ann. Doris was by far the cuter daughter, and what feelings had that imparted? In conversation, Tracy had often proven to be dull and unimaginative, and Claire had always put that down to coming from new money. Did Tracy, Claire wondered, possess any real understanding of human depravity? Were the things Doris was relating even mean much to her mother?
Claire now knew that Evelyn despised her mother almost as much as she despised had her sister Ann, yet because Claire had taken the time to understand where that anger came from, she now regarded Tracy and Doris as close cousins to the sort of person Ann had always been. Some people, she knew, were just better at concealing their truest selves. Some people were chameleons. And they became that way out of need.
Why had Tracy?
She turned her gaze to Doris again, and now she could feel deceit boiling away inside of the girl, almost magmatic guilt waiting to erupt and spill out over her family, ruining all their lives. So Claire took a deep breath and began.
“You know what, Doris? I don’t believe a thing you’re saying?”
“What?” Doris replied, her left eye twitching.
“I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
Tracy moved to protect her daughter.
Claire wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Tracy, sit down,” she declared.
There was something in Claire’s voice that Tracy recognized, something she thought of as the power of an inherent, self-evident truth, and that stopped her in her tracks.
Claire remained focused on Doris, her eyes now savage, vengeful: “Where were you when all this happened?” she said, her eyes leveled on Doris.
“When what happened?” Doris shot back.
“When my sister was murdered. Where were you?”
“In my room, at the dorm.”
“No, you weren’t,” Claire stated, her voice the incisive, matter of fact words of a magistrate pronouncing sentence. “Stop lying to me.”
“Excuse me?” Doris said, unsettled by this unexpected attack.
“You were with Ann. Now tell me where you were.”
“How do you know where I was?”
Bill turned and looked at his sister. He recognized something in her voice, the same voice she had used to confront Ann with her misdeeds, even when their father wouldn’t listen. He felt Doris beseeching him, asking him to help her, and he could feel the manipulation in her eyes.
“Doris, if you know more than you’ve told us now is the time to just let it go.” His eyes were still as unforgiving, yet he recognized she needed a lifeline. “If you hold onto this, if you’re keeping something important from us, over time the guilt will tear you apart. It will end up tearing this family apart, too. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, Dad, I do.” She was looking down now, and he could see the tears falling from her face hitting the tiles below, so he came and sat by her side, put his arms around her and gave her a gentle squeeze.
“What do we need to know, Dorie? What did Ann get you all messed up in?”
Doris looked up as if lost and alone, then she just shook her head and took a deep breath.
“Ann called me a lot my first semester. Came by when I didn’t have class, took me out to lunch or dinner, and we even spent a few weekends together that year. She took me up to Vermont, to Woodstock when the leaves were turning, and up to Stowe that January, to go skiing. She was so sweet, you know?”
He nodded. “In my experience…well, if she was acting like that it was because she wanted something from you.”
Doris nodded. “My second year we went out dancing a few times. And drinking. Sometimes with her friends…”
“Men?”
“Yeah, Dad. Men.”
His lips quivered. His sister had been grooming her, and when he looked at Claire he could tell she had already surmised that. “Sex?” he asked.
“Yeah, Dad. Sex.”
“Older men?”
Doris nodded.
And Claire leaned in now. “And when did Ann start taking you to these S&M parties?”
“Not long after.”
“Doris, what happened at these parties?” Claire asked, now the patient, and sympathetic interrogator.
Doris looked away, lost in the cascade of memory the question had released.
“Doris?” Claire repeated gently, her voice little more than a whisper. “Come back to us, okay? Don’t go there? Don’t let Ann keep you there. You have to let it go. You have to let her go…”
More tears. The eternal struggle between truth and denial. Between deceit and bearing witness.
And so Doris began an exposition of the things she had seen and done. The orgies, for months every Saturday night, the scenes lasting hours and hours. Men jacked on speed and Viagra, most of the women she saw were on ‘ludes or coke. Some weekends she was the dominatrix, some she was the submissive. Ann told her it was so that she could get in touch with her inner self, her repressed feelings, but that in time she would know who she was and could choose one or the other. And as she spoke it didn’t seem to Bill all that big a mystery, because almost immediately she knew she was a top, or a dominatrix. Just like Ann.
Now almost in a trance, Doris described the things she had experienced, the things she had done to an with both men and women, and then she’d dropped another bombshell. She related how she had increasingly seen herself as being bisexual – while also ferociously dominant. She couldn’t date boys any longer, not at school now, not anywhere, because she simply could not filter out what she had become. All her interactions with boys in her classes had turned toxic as she felt herself becoming more and more like Ann. Because, Bill understood, Ann was all of these things, too.
And all the while Bill was staring at his daughter. He saw her, in a way, but he realized there is nothing within her he understood. She had, in her way, taken Ann into her soul and become a repudiation of everything he had stood for all his life. Even worse, Doris’s feelings for him are written in the blank stare of her gaze when she looked at him, and it was clear she had become Ann, incarnate.
Claire thought that Doris had embraced darkness, and through her questioning the veil had been pierced and cast aside. She had suddenly found herself staring into the hollow gaze of pure evil, though Bill no longer looked at the world in such terms. Yet no longer was that truth something Doris could conceal. No, the simple truth was that this new reality was just the latest chapter Ann had visited upon their lives, all their lives, so now the family had to come together to understand the implications of Doris’s descent.
More importantly, Claire realized she’d have to help her brother prepare for all the unknown consequences yet to come. If someone had killed Ann and her death was related to her activities, Doris was likely in danger. If the person or people involved were as powerful as Doris implied, that danger could take on many dimensions.
Claire turned and looked at her family.
Tracy was just standing there, open-mouthed and aghast, and Claire watched as Tracy turned away from Doris, moved protectively, instinctively, towards Evelyn.
When he could stand it no longer, Bill turned from the sight of his daughter, turned to walk onto the terrace outside the suite’s living room, and Claire shook her head before she followed him.
“I had to do it, William. For her sake, as well as our own.”
He turned to face her, frightened for his daughter and her ability to deceive herself. “My god, Claire, do you understand what she’s done? Do you have any idea?”
“I think we have barely pierced the veil, William.” And with that she turned and looked behind him, scowling imperceptibly.
And without quite knowing why he knew. He could feel her behind him.
The pink creature. She was hovering there in the air behind him, several feet above the patio. Regarding him with detached curiosity. As a scientist might, he thought. Perhaps how a scientist might regard a new species of bacteria.
But then she disappeared.
Just as Tracy came out onto the terrace.
“Was someone with you?” she asked as she came up to him.
“No. Just me and Claire.”
“I thought I saw someone else out here.”
“No, Tracy,” Claire said, “it’s just us and our little nightmares out here.”
Tracy shook her head then came close to her husband and leaned into him, then she laid her head on his shoulder. “Bill, what are we going to do about this…?”
“That depends. We can do the right thing and tell Harwood what we’ve learned…”
“But…?”
“Yes. But. There’s nothing she’s told us that he won’t figure out on his own. Sooner or later, anyway.”
“You don’t think Doris is in danger, do you…?” Tracy added.
“I have no idea, Tracy. What does your gut say?”
“I’m a little frightened right now, Bill…”
“That’s the unknown knocking on your door,” Claire sighed. “I’m not sure I like the way that feels, either.”
“I thought I knew Doris,” Tracy sighed.
“So did I,” Bill said with a shrug.
“How could we have been so wrong?”
“I don’t think you were,” Claire said.
“What does that mean…?” A suddenly suspicious Tracy replied.
“What I see right now,” Bill interjected, “is that Doris was pulled into something like a black hole. The only mistake anyone made, that I made, was ever letting Ann get anywhere near her.”
“But how could you…?”
“Evil always seeks to undo goodness,” Claire said. “But think about it, Tracy, evil can’t just destroy goodness, it has to get goodness to destroy itself. Ever since I…we…we’ve known Ann, we always knew she was pure evil. Bill knew instinctively when he was very young…”
“And you were the one that always had to deal with the consequences of Ann’s manipulations,” Bill added. “Our home was a toxic stew when growing up and I knew that, yet I let Doris come here, to New York. I let her fall into Ann’s hands, but Doris wasn’t strong enough to resist her. She’s always been kind of gullible, you know? Intelligent, but not street smart, if you know what I mean.”
“We tried to protect her from all that, Bill,” Tracy said, exasperated.
“In the end, Tracy,” Bill sighed, “I’m afraid Doris was simply weak.”
“Could all this…just be a dream?” a wistful Tracy asked.
He shook his head as he shrugged. “Or a dream within a dream, maybe?” He scoffed, turned away. “Hell, I don’t know, Tracy, I really don’t, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? What you’re asking is what if all life is really nothing more than a dream?”
Claire looked at him, wondered how far he would go with this.
“You know, we can’t exactly measure consciousness, or the unconscious, yet we can experience it, right?” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “But what if consciousness is nothing more than energy? If that’s the case then we can experience energy? At least we could if that’s true, so take it a step a further. Somehow, here we are, deep within streams of intersecting fields of energy, and these streams become this thing we call consciousness. Maybe, who knows, because that means our lives exist as a field-state, maybe not on the same energy level as our dreams but maybe sometime those field-states intersect. And maybe they interact.”
“You sure you’re not just describing female intuition…?” Tracy said with a smile.
He looked at her and smiled too. “When was the last time we stayed up all night and watched the sunrise together?”
“Last summer, on Argos. Block Island, Great Salt Pond.”
He nodded. “Of course.” He sighed as he took her hand. “That was a kind of dream, wasn’t it? Or it feels like it right now, so what’s the difference between a memory and a dream? Yet they both exist inside us, right? Because we shared the experience…”
“The two of us. Okay, I get that. But what about my kind of dream? Mine was probably different.
“Unless somehow they interact,” Claire said, smiling. “What you just called intuition might really be a consequence of these interactions.”
Bill nodded.
“But Bill knows what I want to do. He understands that.”
“You ready to do that?” he asked.
“Do what?” Tracy said as she turned to face him.
“Sail off into the sunset?”
“I’ve been ready to do that for a long time, Bill. In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed. I just wasn’t ready to accept the reality of that.”
“But you are now?”
He sighed. “Yeah, maybe I am.”
“But that just became impossible, didn’t it?” Claire said.
Bill nodded. “We’re going to have to clean up Ann’s mess before we do anything.”
“We are?” Tracy asked.
He shook his head. “I am. And Claire.”
“Bill? If this is…if the kinds of people you think are involved…if the really are…”
He looked at her and smiled. “Never underestimate what Claire and I can do, Tracy.”
“What does that mean, Bill?”
He smiled, but he didn’t immediately answer the question, either.
“Bill?”
“Tracy, the less you know about this the better off you are.” He saw the question in her eyes. “You’re going to have to trust us on this.”
“Us?”
“Claire. And me. This ain’t our first rodeo, girl.”
Evelyn came out and walked over to them. “Geez, how can you guys stand it out here? It’s so frickin’ cold out…!”
“Evie,” her father said as he slowly came to terms with her new mannerisms, “you’ve been in California too long. It’s beginning to warp your ability to speak English.”
“Chill, Dad.”
“You’re not too old for a spanking, either.”
“Why start now, Dad? You’ll mess up your halo.”
“You’re right. Never thought of it that way.”
Claire walked to the low brick wall. It looked to be about four feet tall, a border of reddish-gray brick with a tubular gray metal railing along the top, and the style blended in with the rest of the building’s semi-modernist architecture. She stood at the rail and turned her face into the breeze and seemed to float there for a moment, like she was measuring the moment. “Bill, does something feel strange to you?” she said as she turned to him.
He nodded. “I’ve felt something all day, but I think the feeling is getting stronger. It feels like something terrible is going to happen, Claire. And it’s going to happen right here,” he said as he pointed at the city. He too turned his face into the breeze and held his arms out wide, his face tilting a little as the building sensation fear washed over him. “Oh, what is that?” he cried. “I can feel it but I can’t see it…”
Tracy was regarding him suspiciously; she stepped back from him, unsure of this odd, new sensation. It felt like she was longer sure who he was…or even what he was…but she told herself that was ridiculous.
Bill turned and walked over to one of the patio chairs and mumbled something about being hungry and needing sleep, but he was also rattling on about how he was afraid to sleep and for a moment Tracy thought he was descending into madness. Then he turned to her. “Is there a room service menu in there?”
“Yes. I’ll go get it…” Tracy said, eyeing him nervously.
As Tracy left the patio he turned to Claire. “Do you know what’s going to happen?”
She shook her head. “We’re safe here, for now. I can’t see anything beyond that, Bill. It’s too dark here.” She looked away, unsettled as she looked at the city and the waters of the Hudson River. “Where’s Argos right now?”
“Rhode Island, just south of Providence.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
He nodded and quickly said “Yeah” just as Tracy came out with the the room service menu.
He was in luck. They had Eggs Benedict.
+++++
He ate first, then showered and put on fresh clothes, yet the feeling of oppressive darkness was growing by the minute. It felt like an all-encompassing evil had gathered and was spreading everywhere he looked. Without thinking he packed his suitcase as the feeling grew, then he went back out onto the terrace to find Tracy.
Claire was out there with Evelyn, but now Evelyn was shaking like a leaf.
He walked up to her but Claire stopped him.
“She’s like you were, Bill, once upon a time. She’s learning to see. She’s always been able to, she just didn’t know how to focus.”
Evie turned and looked at him, her eyes red-rimmed and tear-streaked. “Daddy? Do you feel it too?”
He nodded. “It’s almost here.” He went over to the wall once again and looked out over the river, at the city once again deep inside its very own perpetual motion machine, and right then he heard smoldering evil in the air.
It came on as a low whistling hum, almost like the high-pitched howl of jet engines at full thrust.
The American 767 shot by just a few hundred feet overhead and he instinctively ducked as the noise hit, then he turned and stood transfixed as the aircraft and all those terrified souls onboard flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. They were so close that the explosion very nearly knocked them all off their feet. Claire was visibly shaking now, Evelyn fell to the patio floor and started screaming as a long series of explosions rocked the city. Bill stood watching, his fists balling and releasing, contracting and extending as he watched the fuel-air combustion spread, and how glass and debris arced out from the two visible sides of the tower.
Then Tracy came and held onto him. “Oh God…oh God…all those people…”
“It’s gotta be Bin Laden again,” Bill growled between gritted teeth as he watched black smoke pouring from the wound on the side of the building. “It’s just gotta be that fucking coward.”
Claire turned to her brother, and with her voice shaking she managed to say just two words: “Argos. Now,” before she fell back into one of the patio chairs and starting gasping for air. A few minutes later she stood and pointed at something low over New Jersey: “Bill…what is that?” she asked as the darkness came for them once again.
Everyone stood transfixed as a second 767 arced through the skies like an arrow before it penetrated the South Tower. More flaming debris rained down on Lower Manhattan, darker gouts of black, sooty smoke poured out of the second strike and suddenly it seemed that the only sounds coming from the island were frantic sirens and waves of endless screams.
“Everyone grab a bag and head for the elevators. I’m going for the car and I’ll pull up in front…” He stopped at the front desk and settled his account, then followed his family out into the chaos.
The streets were full of running men and women, most dressed for another day at the office. Now most everyone was covered with the tattered remnants of fluttering debris, some had visible wounds on their faces, everyone was running and stumbling away from the towers, panic in their eyes as they searched for help. Firetrucks approached, their wailing sirens and blaring honks adding to the pandemonium, yet everywhere he looked it seemed that no one knew what to do.
He made it to the parking garage and found no attendant on-duty and the barricade raised; he made his way to the car and drove to the hotel’s lobby entrance. Everyone piled into the Lincoln in a blind rush. More sirens, more ambulances arriving on scene now, cops everywhere trying to get some kind of perimeter established. Bill turned against traffic on an almost empty one way street and then turned away from the carnage, taking 6th Avenue north and away from The Battery. Once in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel he was on 495, then the 278 to the 95 and he was out of the city heading to Argos.
+++++
Some segments of the aviation community recovered after the events of 9/11 faster than others, but generally speaking air travel collapsed afterwards. For a while fuel prices soared and international travel collapsed, none of which impacted operations at Orbital Sciences. Tennyson was working both sides of the fence by then, spending more than 90 percent of his time working engineering problems related to Pegasus launches, the rest of his time supervising the maintenance operations of the TriStar and maintaining current with his training.
He had developed a reputation for being one of the better L-1011 training captains in the country, though by the early 2000s TriStar operators were dwindling as airframes aged-out and were replaced by more economical new aircraft. The L-10, as the community referred to the TriStar, was also one of the last commercial airliners whose cockpit was full of so-called “steam gauges,” or round instruments with mechanical internal workings. Newer aircraft operating systems were utilizing GPS waypoints to navigate in 3-D space, while aircraft such as the TriStar, older DC-10s and early 737 models all still utilized older technology, and in the case of the 737 many were still operating with only radio-based aids to navigation, which had seen only modest, incremental improvements since the second world war. The TriStar was now one of the last commercial aircraft in service that was equipped to handle a full Category III Autoland – or – to be able to shoot an NDB, on Non-Directional-Beacon approach, which, having been developed when air mail was flown in bi-planes, remained one of the most primitive types of foul weather approaches still in relatively common usage.
As the events of 9/11 gave way to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the subsequent activation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, civilian airlines were increasingly called upon to move troops from the United States to staging areas in the Azores, Italy, and Turkey. Many of there airlines were charter carriers or air cargo operators, and more than a few of the CRAF fleet was made up of L-1011 TriStars, but because fewer mainline carriers still used this aircraft there simply weren’t enough line pilots to meet the immediate need.
Bill Tennyson was still years away from the mandatory retirement age and because he was so well known within the tight-knit TriStar community it wasn’t long before someone approached him about flying a small number of flights. Many of the TriStars in use were ex-TWA aircraft and so familiarity wasn’t really an issue, although different carriers maintain different FSMs, or Flight Standards Manuals, to spell out corporate specific procedures, but Tennyson would be flying with line pilots, not taking their place, and besides, he was in fact still a fully rated instructor on the L-1011.
Which was how he came to be in the front office of several old TWA TriStars, aircraft he’d last flown when Bill Clinton was in office, even before Monica Lewinsky came on the scene. He’d be at Pope Army Airfield one day, then maybe a week later at MCAS New River, picking up a couple hundred soldiers or marines, carrying them to their overseas staging area, and sometimes bringing troops home. Every now and then, though rarely, he carried special forces teams and their support staff all the way to Saudi Arabia, and a few times even farther east. By that point his world had been reduced to series of number strings, GPS coordinates and runway lengths, automated balanced field length calculations based on anticipated density altitudes. His mind once again consumed by fuel load versus burn and reserves on approach.
And these things kept him from thinking about Doris as much as he had. Wasn’t it bad enough to lose your sister like he had? Had Ann really needed to drag his daughter down that same path? Had her hatred of their father led her to destroy everything their parents created?
Yes, he had to admit that maybe it had, but why had she never been able to account for her own actions? Was that truly the nature of her dis-ease? Her inability to see herself as she truly was? Or, he wondered, were people generally incapable of such self-analysis?
He remembered his family’s crazy drive from Manhattan just after the towers were struck. Traffic was insane, and he’d come to think that was the best and only way to describe the way people had acted. Supreme self importance, like where such people were headed was the only thing that mattered to them now, and everyone simply needed to get out of their way. Yet why had traffic on Interstate-95 seemed like the epicenter of all that insanity? People stuck in traffic pulling out their hair, banging their fists on their car’s steering wheels, abject anger everywhere he looked. He’d found himself wondering what these same people would be like if the air raid sirens of an imminent atomic attack sounded? How different would they be than the people of Hiroshima that his father had seen and photographed that August morning?
The price of gas had doubled in the first few hours after the aircraft hit the towers, then staples on grocery store shelves had disappeared, and soon everyone he encountered seemed personally stricken by the attacks – but as far as he could tell no one he met had actually been near the towers, and not one was injured. No, what he had witnessed was mass hysteria. Truckers in Arizona running Arabic looking drivers off the road, in one case killing a man in bare-fisted rage. One group of men in Mississippi on the evening news had been screaming into the camera that they wanted to find and kill as many ‘Ragheads’ as they could, but why? Why so much hate? Why was no one taking the time to ask why had this happened?
Where, he wondered, was the dividing line between mass hysteria and mass psychosis.
It was obvious to him that a handful of Islamic fundamentalists had embraced a kind of hysteria, but what if they had indeed become functionally insane? Could that insanity spread to an entire country, or within the adherents to religious community? If so, what would keep that from spreading? Anywhere? Everywhere?
Once everyone was safely on Argos all those things had simply seemed like something remote and far away, like something he’d left behind. Even as overcrowded as they were on the boat, Tracy had plotted their course to Block Island, to the Great Salt Pond again, and they stayed safely at anchor there, going into the little village to grab a cheeseburger a couple of times but otherwise just remaining away from their fellow man. Claire had snagged a room at one of the B&Bs and everyone showered, but then things died down, the insanity passed, and so they’d returned to the marina.
He called Amex again and they’d hopped on the Acela and returned to New York to take care of Ann’s affairs, and to get Doris packed up. He arranged for a funeral home to pick up Ann’s cremated remains and the family had decided he needed to find her papers to figure out what she’d wanted done with them. With a file folder full of notarized death certificates he’d visited her office, then three banks before finding the one box with her papers safely filed away in a safety deposit box. He found nothing, no will, no directives of any kind, just a bunch of small black books in dated envelopes.
Sitting in the secure room inside the bank he read through them, growing more concerned with each entry he read. These were, he soon realized, diaries of all her depravities. She’d named names, too. Famous names, important people. She’d documented dates and venues, too. She’d even diagramed the human sacrifices she’d supposedly witnessed, and the more he read the more convinced he grew that these were the scribblings of a lunatic. Still, there was enough information in these books to end more than a few high-profile political careers, so he did what he thought best. He put them back in their envelopes and these he put in his briefcase, and after he’d consolidated all her accounts into one, he took all the information he’d uncovered to his own lawyer in Boston.
“Nolan, I’d like you to read through these right now, because I need some advice.”
“Bill, it will take me a few hours to read all this. Two at least? You sure I need to do this?”
Tennyson nodded. “You’ll understand after a few pages.”
So Bill sat in his lawyer’s office, watching the man’s reactions as he turned page after page of Ann’s telling of her activities, a couple of times reaching for a bottle of antacid tablets, chomping them down like peanuts, all the while taking notes. Three hours later the attorney had looked up and nodded. His hands were shaking.
“You say she was murdered? In midtown?”
Bill nodded.
“My advice is this. Let me burn this material. All of it. If you turn this over to law enforcement there’s no telling where this information will end up, but I’d assume the people listed in here will assume you’ve read it and that you are therefore a threat to them. They might do nothing, or they might arrange for you to get audited by the IRS every year until you die. They might kill someone else in your family. Or you. My point is there’s absolutely no telling what such people might do, really, but in your position I’d assume the worst.”
He nodded. “I assumed as much.”
“Do you have an offramp?”
“A what?”
“If the worst happens, what would you do?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Good way to get killed, Bill. You, and maybe your family, too. What you need is an offramp. A way to disappear in a moments notice. Without leaving a trace, by the way.”
“I take it you do? Have an offramp, I mean?”
Nolan smiled. “Several,” the man smiled as he steepled his fingers mischievously.
“Could you set one up for me?”
Nolan shook his head. “That defeats the purpose, Bill. No one, I repeat no one should know any of these details. I can give you guidelines, but the specifics will be up to you, and it will require some legwork.”
“How’d you learn about this stuff, Nolan? I mean, there’s not some kind of class in law school on this stuff, is there?”
His lawyer shook his head. “No, there isn’t.”
“Do I even want to know?” Bill asked reluctantly. Then Bill remembered Nolan had ‘worked for the government’ once. In some kind of law enforcement that worked overseas a lot.
“No, you don’t.”
“Okay. Well then, burn it. Burn all of that goddamn’d stuff.”
Of course, Bill had made photocopies of everything. Just in case.
+++++
“I’m so tired of this new schedule I can’t even think straight anymore,” Tracy sighed. Instead of retiring, and instead of taking the teaching position at the American flight attendant’s training academy, she’d opted to continue flying. As her seniority had transferred, thanks to her union contract, she’d managed to remain based in Boston and had the status to bid on the Logan to Charles De Gaulle run, because she simply loved Paris. Over the years she had learned the language and so she often helped younger FAs get around the city. She and Bill had taken frequent breaks there, often just spur of the moment getaways when he was still with TWA, and she could still put those short-notice vacations together. Two hours after he left Nolan’s office, he asked her to do just that. And that was where they were this morning, walking along the Seine looking across the water at the intricate, 13th-century traceries on Sainte Chapelle’s lone gothic spire.
“What are your retirement options at work?” he asked his wife.
“Depends,” she retorted. “How much longer are you going to work?”
He looked down at the sidewalk, reluctant to open this can of worms again. Ever since 9/11 she’d been ready to cut loose and sail away, yet something had been stopping him. Something beyond the lingering doubt of becoming a full-time liveaboard sailor. Because, his thinking went…where would we go? What would they do once they got there? And why? Why slog it out on a boat for weeks at a time when they could literally go anywhere in the world, and be there in hours, not weeks.
But that argument meant nothing to her, and as their situation had changed he doubted the wisdom of staying in Boston. But why take off on a boat? Would they be safer?
The journey meant more than the destination, she always said. The sense of accomplishment, she maintained, would become the real reason for taking these trips on Argos.
He’d remained dubious. But not so much right now.
Still, he was not sure of himself where sailing was concerned.
Because, for one, he loved his half hour showers in the morning, after his five mile run. He’d been running since high school and became something of an addict at Annapolis – where running was the norm – and he could still grind out five miles in under 40 minutes if he had to. Second, he enjoyed sailing…on clear days with light winds. They’d been caught out in a minor storm before, making the trip from Nantucket back to the marina when a sudden storm hit, and he didn’t like it out there under those conditions. Tracy, on the other hand, loved it. Loved it! While Argos could take nasty weather with ease, the feeling of being so exposed bothered him.
And taking a long trip meant cutting ties to home. Being out of communication range. Being…alone. And while Tracy almost seemed to long for solitude, he liked the camaraderie of the cockpit or the engineering teams he’d recently been assigned to work with.
But then there was the dream. That dream. The island. The palms, Tracy in the Zodiac rushing out to Argos. The other woman, the stranger. And then there was that pink creature, always there, always studying him. And Claire. She wasn’t talking about it these days, but she was concealing something big. From him. And that really bugged him.
He’d woken in a sweat that morning only to find white sand in the bed…sand from his feet. He’d never had a problem at this hotel before, the he realized that his sweat smelled like sunscreen. But he hadn’t used sunscreen since last summer, in Maine. And then after he’d looked in the mirror he’d found his face red from recent exposure to a lot of sunlight. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Because when he was standing there, looking at himself in the mirror over the basin in the hotel bathroom, Tracy came in and she was absolutely sunburned. As in: to a crisp. And it was January. In Paris. And then they’d stared at one another in that little mirror almost in a state of shock…
“I was having a dream,” he began. “We were anchored off some island and it felt like, oh, I don’t know, maybe somewhere in the tropics…”
“And you had just slumped over in the cockpit, you are on Argos…”
“What?” he cried. “Are you saying you had the same dream?”
She nodded. “You’re on Argos and Claire and I are walking back from the village with fresh bread…”
“You can’t mean it. We can’t be having the same dream?”
She nodded, the wonder of the moment almost overwhelming. “We’re on Argos,” she sighed. “Claire and Evelyn are on Moonlight…”
“Moonlight? What the hell is…”
“Claire’s sailboat. Just like ours, but with…”
“…a white hull?” he asked.
“That’s right. A Hinckley, a 42 like ours.”
He snorted derisively. “Claire? On a sailboat? Man, that’s some kind of dream…”
“How long have you been having it?” she asked. “The dream, I mean?”
He shrugged, shook his head. “I can’t remember the first time, but it was a while ago…”
“How often?”
“Oh, man, I can’t…well, maybe once a month, maybe more…”
“It started a year ago,” Tracy said. “Sometimes once a week. It’s funny, Bill, because at first I thought it was something like repressed desire coming out in that dream…”
They usually had breakfast across from their hotel, the Hotel Saint-Louis en L’Isle, a little place located on the Île Saint-Louis, at a small crêperie, then they took their usual walk across the Pont Saint Louis to the walkway along the south side of the cathedral, across the Pont au Double to the old Shakespeare & Company Bookstore. Coffee was next, then when the weather cooperated, find a bench in the Square René Viviani before continuing along the Quai Saint-Michel to the Pont Saint-Michel, over to walk through Sainte Chapelle before returning to the hotel for some intramural sports between the sheets.
But today had been different.
The weather had been ferociously uncooperative, the north wind creating whitecaps and spume on the Seine, and after the revelation about the shared dream they’d been having, they stopped by the bookstore and looked for anything by Freud or Jung about interpreting dreams, then beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel.
Down to the basement they went, to the barrel-vaulted restaurant for coffee and croissant, then up to one of the sitting rooms off the lobby to talk.
“We love it here,” he finally said, “so why don’t we buy a little place here on the island and retire?”
She crossed her arms and her lower lip jutted out a bit. “If that’s what you want, then by all means. I hope you enjoy your dotage here.”
He nodded, quietly accepting this defeat. “So, you have an itinerary all mapped out in your head, I take it?” he asked.
The lip retracted a little, her arms opened to accept his surrender. “I want to do the coconut run,” she said defiantly, daring him to object.
“You mean Tahiti? The South Pacific?”
“I do, yes.”
“You wouldn’t be content with, say, Bermuda for a week or two?”
She shook her head.
“What’s with Claire and the boat…in the dream?”
“I don’t know. Have you asked her?”
“Hell no. She’d laugh in my face if I told her we were having the same dream, let alone…”
“May I make a suggestion?”
He hesitated, his brow furrowed as he wondered where her next line of attack would carry them. “Sure. I guess,” he sighed, resigned to the inevitable.
“Why don’t you call her and ask?”
“How’d I know you were going to say just that?”
“Are you getting clairvoyant as you ripen?” she asked, still relishing the fact that she was almost fifteen years younger than he, and not at all hesitant to rub his nose in it – when or if necessary.
“Ripen?” he sighed. “You aren’t exactly a spring chicken, you know?”
“And that’s my point, Bill. We wait ten more years and will we, will you even be able to make a trip like this?”
“I can’t answer that, Tracy. No one can.”
“And that’s precisely my point, Bill. We can, right now. You and I. Together. The trip of a lifetime. Together.”
“You mean…leave now?”
“In late April.”
“Full time, I take it?”
She nodded. “A clean break,” she added, perhaps more brightly than necessary.
A woman from the reception desk approached their table, and Bill looked up expectantly.
“Dr Tennyson?” the woman said.
“Yes?”
She handed him a note as she spoke. “The caller said that it was most urgent that you return their call,” then she left them in perplexed silence while Bill opened the envelope and skimmed the contents of the message.
“Nolan,” he said.
“Your lawyer?”
He nodded as he pulled out his Motorola. “No signal here. I’ll go up to the room.”
“Let’s both go. I need to freshen up.”
Their room was on the top floor and had a small terrace that looked out over Notre Dame, and as it also had excellent cell phone reception he looked at his watch and nodded, then dialed the number on the message.
“Bill? That you?”
“Nolan, yes, I just got your message.”
“Whew, thank God.”
“Nolan, what’s wrong?”
“Bill, I don’t know how to…but…well…Doris is, well, she’s dead. Apparent suicide, but the detective I just spoke to said it looks staged, like a professional hit…”
Tennyson sat on the edge of the bed, then slid to the floor, his world suddenly spinning out of control, everything he’d wanted out of life now slipping from his grasp. Tracy came running out of the bathroom and found his telephone on the carpet, so she grabbed it…
“Hello? Nolan? This is Tracy, what’s happened?”
So the attorney recounted what he knew so far, what the police had deduced in the earliest stages of their investigation. Then he added: “Look, Tracy, I’m not at all sure that you two are safe here. Whoever did this defeated the security system in your place, and that took planning and resources. Professional level resources, if you get my drift.”
“Nolan, what are you saying?”
“Someone knew where the safe in the basement was located. They made it in, defeated the security mechanisms to get to it, then closed it. Do you know if, well, ask Bill if he kept a copy of Ann’s diaries, would you? Right now, please.”
She did. “Nolan, he says he didn’t. Why? What was in them?”
“He hasn’t told you?”
“No. Not one word.”
“Bill still has a sister, correct?”
“Yes? Why?”
“Well, it’s not inconceivable that she could be in some danger, as well…”
Tracy listened, asked if there was anything else they needed to know…
“Tell Bill now’s the time to take that offramp. He’ll understand, Tracy.”
“Okay, Nolan. I’ll tell him. Thanks.”
She rang off then dialed Claire’s number from memory; when Evelyn answered she spoke forcefully without going through the niceties: “I need to speak with Claire,” Tracy told her daughter, “right now.”
Evelyn knew that tone of voice and ran off to get her aunt.
“Tracy? What’s happened?”
She told her. Everything Nolan had just told her, including the possibility of further danger.
Claire listened, and despite the heartache she knew now was not the time to give in to despair. “Where’s William?” she asked.
“On the floor. Basically, I think he’s gone catatonic on me, Claire.”
“Put the phone up to his ear, would you?”
Tracy could hear the sudden stream of invective swearing coming from Claire’s end from two feet away, and Bill’s eyes flickered and came back to life. Suddenly he grabbed the phone from his wife and brought it up to his face.
“Claire, are you still having the dream?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why?”
“Tracy is too.”
“Bill, so is Evelyn.”
“Oh for pity’s sake, you’ve got to be kidding me! Claire…what’s going on?”
He could hear the hesitation in Claire’s voice as she spoke her next few words. “Bill, have they been in contact with you?”
“Who?”
“Bill, we don’t have time for this right now…”
He sighed. “Yeah Claire, the tall one is in the dream.”
“The pink?”
“Yeah.”
“Any others?”
“No. Just her.”
“Ask Tracy is she’s seen anything unusual, like some kind of pink creature…”
He did. She had not.
“Bill, has she ever tried to say anything to you?”
“No, bot in a long time. Now she just looks at me like she always has, like she’s watching my reactions to something. Wait a second…no, that’s not right. One time she asked if I was ready, ready for death, then I woke up…”
“Where you at the island?”
“The island? Hell, it was an island, but what do you mean by ‘the’ island?”
“If we’re having the same dream it’s likely an implanted memory, Bill. I have to assume it’s the same for all of us, because, well, nothing else makes sense…”
“Claire, nothing about any of this makes sense…but what I want to know is what are you doing on a boat? You’ve never even had a rubber duck in a bathtub, let alone a…”
“Moonlight, right?” Claire asked. “White hull, red stripe just above the waterline? Is that in your dream?”
“Yup. She’s a Hinckley Sou’wester 42, like Argos. And I mean just like Argos except for the hull color.”
“Bill, uh, Evie and I were at a friend’s birthday in Sausalito last weekend at a place on the water. We went out to look at boats before we drove home and there was a sailboat there called Moonlight. It looked just like yours.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Bill, she was for sale.”
“Look, I’ve got a bigger problem right now. My lawyer thinks it might be dangerous for us in Boston, but we’ve got to go back there for, well, you know…”
“I agree.”
“I don’t know what to do, Claire…”
“Bill, I’m so sorry this had to spill over onto your family. That Ann had to spill over on you like this again, but you have to take care of Tracy now. But I agree, something still feels wrong, and if we get together for a funeral that might just make it easy for whoever is doing this. You do what you have to do right now and I’ll take care of Evie until we can meet up.”
He paused while he thought of an idea, then he just spit it out: “Claire, do you think she’d help us?”
“The pink? Wow, Bill, you go from not wanting to have anything to do with them to full-blown dependence. You sure you want to go down that path?”
“No. Just asking.”
“Look, Bill, I don’t think they want to get involved, but then again I’m not sure why they singled you and me out in the first place, but I do know we’re not alone. There are others, Bill. Like us. I think they’re in contact with a few of them here in the city.”
“It was just a thought, Claire.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“No. I have an offramp.”
She did not know what that was, so he explained it to her, in great detail.”
+++++
Just before two in the morning, StarGazer, Orbital Science’s L-1011, settled onto final preparing to land at the old air force base in Westhampton, New York. Runway 2-4 at the airport was over 9,000 feet long and so more than long enough to handle the TriStar, but after touchdown the jet taxied to the ramp and barely stopped before it turned and made for the runway again, pausing briefly to run-up the engines before taking off again. Total time on the ground: less than 5 minutes. No one, not even the people in the control tower, saw the two people exit via the lower level airstairs, and no one saw them walk over to a small private jet parked well away from any lights. The Cessna Citation took off ten minutes after StarGazer and turned northeast towards Block Island, Rhode Island. By five that morning Bill and Tracy were onboard Argos; they left their mooring in the pond and cleared the island by 0530; they plotted their course, 145 degrees true, and calculated their distance, 615 nautical miles, to the entrance buoy off St George’s, Bermuda and raised a double-reefed main and a storm staysail, proceeding into the North Atlantic. It was, of course, still January, and the seas off the New England coast were raging.
Tracy was at last fully in her element, howling with glee as Argos slammed into 12 foot seas, the Hinckley cutting through them like a scalpel. Bill, however, spent the first two days hunched over the lee rail, blowing beets out his nose and cursing the day he’d met his wife. On day three and now deep within a warm eddy in the Gulf Stream, the seas fell into a dead calm and life on Argos calmed down a bit. Bill managed to hold down some broth. A few hours later it was ramen in more broth. Tracy was exhausted and fell into the berth in the aft cabin and slept like the dead, only to be jolted awake when Bill’s watch ended, when the ship’s bell signaled the change of watch. He’d managed to cook bacon and eggs for lunch and held them down, and once he started eating and sleeping regularly he started to regain his strength.
With the calm seas they began to see more marine life. Dolphins swam in their bow wave and in their gurgling wake, flying fish landed with a slap on the deck and Bill tried to pick them up and toss them back into the sea before they died.
And early one morning the orca appeared.
But it wasn’t just some random orca, it was the orca from Southwest Harbor, the same big male. He looked at it now and thought it had to be at least twenty five feet long, maybe more, and his girth was astonishing, and he’d watched it swimming alongside Argos for at least an hour and it soon felt like the orca was some kind of sentinel, like he was watching over them.
‘Or is it just me?’
What was this connection? Where had it come from?
On the fifth day out they called Bermuda Radio and checked in for clearance to the harbor at St Georges; on Day 6 they refueled and reprovisioned and immediately took off for the Turks and Caicos, and almost immediately the orca took up his station a few hundred feet aft.
They took on more fuel at West Turk, and Bill loaded more fresh seafood aboard before casting off the next day for the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. Rather than stop in Jamaica, Tracy had wanted to sail directly to Panama while Bill had wanted to stop in the Caymans to do some banking – and that took precedence. He called a Panama Canal agent from there, prepared the way for their passage through the canal, and he enjoyed a few days of long, blissful showers before heading south again.
And once again, when they were back in deep water, the orca reappeared. Always hanging back, always keeping a watchful eye on Argos. Or was it watching him?
After their arrival in Colon, they checked in with the agent and got their transit papers. Even so, they had to wait three days in an insect infested marina west of town until their scheduled reporting time and place, whence they were boarded by a pilot who scowled in frustration when he saw the size of the boat he was in charge of for his next passage through the canal. Tracy did her best to feed him well and late on the second day they dropped him off. The pilot left and Argos made for the next marina, this one on the Pacific. More fuel, two long trips in rental cars to stock up at local grocery stores. Two calls made, one to Claire.
Fully provisioned again, this would be their longest crossing yet, 3600 miles from Panama City, Panama to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands. Bill had expected more of the same, more endless storms and sleepless nights, but the reality of this next passage soon became one of long, languid days spent under equatorial sunlight, finding cool shade and reading a book, or working down below in the early morning, baking bread without heating up the cabin too much. Bill tried to catch fish a few times, only managing to snag a blue shark on his first attempt, and that poor creature convinced them both that it did not want to be eaten – before thrashing the side of the hull and swimming off in anger. Dark, fast moving squall lines, rain-streaked and fierce, came on hard and disappeared as quickly, rarely kicking up waves or swell, and while each storm forced them to reduce sail, the cool rain felt nice. A few times the rain fell just long enough to wash their hair and to quickly rinse away the soap, yet ten minutes later the sun would come out again, ready to roast them dry.
And all the while the orca swam along, quietly on guard.
One night in light air Bill saw the lights of an airliner high overhead and he just stared longingly at the sight until the blinking red anti-collision lights disappeared over the far horizon, leaving him to grumpily shake his head in disgust – when he dryly noted their current speed was topping out at a blistering 4.2 knots. Then a few hours later and without warning, they had to change course in the middle of the night to avoid being run down by a huge cargo ship – and whose crews did not respond to any calls on the VHF radio. The next morning another tanker passed by so close that Bill could plainly see that not a soul was manning the bridge – it was simply plowing its way across the open ocean on autopilot. Then, as they entered and sailed across one of the main shipping lanes between North America and New Zealand, they dodged shipping containers that dotted the seas all around like roadside litter. On a whim, Bill lowered sail as they approached one of the steel behemoths, a blue container streaked with rust, and as the seas were calm he hopped aboard and just managed to open an inspection port. When he used a flashlight on the cargo within he saw hundreds of boxes of high priced audio speakers, the contents of the container probably worth hundreds of thousand of dollars, and it was floating out there in the middle of the Pacific, just another container abandoned and waiting for rust to claim it. One afternoon they counted more than forty containers, little triangular bergs jutting from the surface on the mirror calm seas. What would happen, he asked Tracy, if they were under full sail in a stiff breeze in the middle of the night – and they hit one doing eight knots? Easy answer, that: they’d get to try out their new life raft.
Bill tried to adjust the radar to pick them up but the radar targets were just too small to see unless the seas were dead calm and they kept the radar range at an eighth of a mile. Maybe, he wondered, some kind of sonar would work, but both decided they needed the radar set to 24 miles to spot tankers and cargo ships, as these were the greater danger.
Or were they?
Yet all the while the orca remained on station, as always just a few hundred feet behind Argos. When the seas were calm his glistening black dorsal fin would pop up and scythe along before disappearing again, and a few minutes later it would reappear. In rough seas he was harder to spot and Bill had to really concentrate, but no, on the crest of a wave or deep in a trough that dorsal fin would pop up, like a metronome beating to a rhythm all its own.
Hiva Oa appeared when and where it was supposed to, a pale green mound hovering above the thermals in the distance, and that morning a small green and yellow bird visited them, perching on the dodger above the companionway, looking nervously about while it rested. Bill filled a cup with fresh water and set out some sunflower seeds and the little guy sat for a quick snack then off it went. As if on cue a pod of dolphins appeared and surfed on Argos’ bow wave, Tracy leaning over and slapping the hull just above the curling water, hoping to get one of them to come close. They surfed alongside for a few minutes and then were as quickly gone. Another sailboat appeared on the horizon, apparently leaving the island and headed west, and the sails soon disappeared behind an approaching squall. Tracy called on the radio to check in and got permission to approach the island, but there was no fanfare, no greetings by flower carrying natives.
Later that afternoon they anchored off the village of Atone in forty feet of clear green water; Tracy hoisted their amber Q flag, or Quarantine flag, to indicate their’s was the vessel that needed to be checked by officials. Once cleared-in, they spent the next two days taking on water and always more fuel, and, finally, more fresh fruit and seafood, then they set out for Rangiroa in the Tuamotus Island Group.
Bill had learned that planning wasn’t about creating rigid schedules and sticking to them, instead it is about creating options. Rigid schedules tied you to a route, to another schedule, and such schedules compromised the very reason for cruising. When you’re out there and see something new, something interesting, or if you meet people worth getting to know better, schedules destroy such opportunities. Good planning, on the other hand, makes it possible to have the supplies and resources on hand to explore unforeseen options as they appear, so if he thought the next leg of the journey might take 20 days, he provisioned for 60.
Yet timing is everything on a sailboat, especially when approaching the entrances to harbors, but this became even more critical when attempting to enter the very narrow pass they found off the village of Avatoru, at Rangiroa Atoll. Avatoru is easiest navigable channel into the atoll’s central lagoon, and at its widest it’s about 200 yards and over a hundred feet deep in the center of the channel, but the way ahead narrowed considerably as Argos approached Motu Tara, an islet in the dead center of the pass. Depth hadn’t been an issue but as they approached Motu Tara the depth quickly shoaled to ten feet, then eight. Tracy began a slow turn to port, or to their left, and as they’d entered the pass when the tides were turning, water was pushing Argos along, accelerating as it was constricted in the narrowing inlet. Their speed picked up rapidly and Argos teetered on the edge of uncontrollability, but just as suddenly they were through, spit out into the deeper waters of the lagoon off the village.
But nothing had prepared them for what they found.
The lagoon at Rangiroa is immense, and at 45 x 15 miles it is larger than the main island of Tahiti, and yet the waters are of wildly varying depth. The waters are, however, crystal clear and of a perfect depth for scuba divers of all abilities. Sea life abounds in the relatively shallow waters bear the atolls coral lined shores, yet depths up to 115 feet are not uncommon just a few hundred feet from the village. And so the orca following Argos slipped in unnoticed.
Scuba divers in big Zodiacs roared by, heading for the pass at the turn of the tide so the divers could get up close and personal with the white tip reef sharks that cruised the waters off the inlet, and as Tracy went up to the bow to drop anchor she waved at the divers as they passed. After Bill backed down to set the anchor he joined her forward, looking at the village and the water beneath Argos.
“It’s like we’re in a swimming pool,” she sighed as she scanned the shoreline about 50 yards away.“And there’s supposed to be a market not far from the dingy landing.”
“I could care less” he growled sourly. “I want a hotel room that doesn’t move every time a wave hits, and a shower with an endless supply of hot water. Beyond that, I really don’t give a flying fuck what else is here…”
“There’s also a place to get a massage,” she snickered.
“Now I could get behind some of that,” he grinned. “Where?”
“Maybe they do ‘happy ending,’ Bill?”
“That’s your job, kiddo.”
“Not with this sunburn, bucko.”
“Okay. One massage with happy ending, here I come.”
“You are awful.”
+++++
They told officials in the village that they planned to stay a few days, but they ended up staying several months. Bill found an interesting hotel near the airport that fronted the lagoon, complete with thatched roof bungalows right on the water. They moved Argos so she lay at anchor within easy swimming distance, and he stayed there while Tracy flew to Papeete to visit a dermatologist and gynecologist. With little else to do he started taking scuba diving lessons while she was away, and when she returned they finished the class together. Soon they were going on shark dives off the pass, then spending hours on end snorkeling around the vast lagoon around Argos almost every day.
And he swam with the orca as often as he could, though he took pains to keep that part of his life out of sight.
And to those who saw the couple perhaps the only thing that might have come to mind was that they were two middle aged Americans out enjoying the fruits of their labors. They appeared happy and seemingly without a care in the world, though of course such was not the case.
They were still on Bill’s offramp, slowly but surely disappearing from view. All the while looking for people who might be following them. Stalking them.
And yet at the same time, while all this had been happening, one other part of the plan was coming together far, far away.
Claire and Evelyn and, of all people, Tracy’s father Ted were at that time on Moonlight, the other Hinckley Sou’wester 42. Claire and Evelyn had sailed from Sausalito to Santa Barbara, California, then mentioned that they were on their way to San Diego and Baja, but they stopped at Avalon, the old casino village on Catalina Island, and Ted – now in his 70s – was waiting for them on the town dock – with his new girlfriend. Soon, with their duffels stowed, the four of them set out for Honolulu.
This was something new for two of them, for Claire and Maria Cantrell, Ted’s friend. Evelyn was by now an experienced, and competent, sailor, while Ted was comfortable with boats and the sea, so Evelyn took Maria and Ted stuck with Claire when each pair stood watch. Evelyn was a good teacher when she was interested in the subject matter, and the crew of Moonlight soon grew comfortable with their new routines. Eighteen days later they arrived off Diamond Head.
With that leg out of the way, Claire and Ted managed the refueling and taking on water, while Evie and Maria did the grocery shopping. Once everything was stowed Moonlight set out for Rangiroa.
Claire had scoffed at the idea when Bill told her the bare outlines of his plan, yet she had seen the logic behind it. Disappear for a few years, let things die down, then she could return to San Francisco, Ted to Naples, and Evelyn could set out on the boat for a life of her own. Things would blow over. Life would return to normal.
Yet Claire had been devastated by Doris’ murder, probably because she felt it had been preventable. Doris had been the weak link in the chain, the easy mark, and as Boston had been so close to New York, and the connections between the two cities so solid, the danger had never really gone away. Maybe Doris had realized how tenuous her situation really was, or maybe she finally just didn’t care, but she had exposed herself to the wrong people and had put all her family at risk.
Or maybe Doris had been, in the end, too much like Ann. Within the confines of Claire’s worldview, evil had taken root in Doris, just as it had Ann, but that was because Claire looked at the world as equally divided between light and dark, or good and evil. And the truth was she always had. Bill had too, at least until he went to Annapolis, then he increasingly saw the world in more transactional terms.
More relevant, Bill had increasingly felt like calling someone Evil was intellectually lazy. By calling someone innately evil you eliminated the possibility that things like upbringing made no difference. If someone was evil, well then…case closed! But it that was so, what about goodness? If some people were innately evil, didn’t follow that others might be innately good? Or were good and evil simply constructs of the mind? Yet hadn’t he always thought Ann was evil. Who had taught her that smothering her baby brother was fun, or good? How had she developed the ability to seduce their father, when she was not even ten years old? Surely their mother hadn’t taught her that? By the time he had taken the required Intro to Psych at Annapolis, and so after he returned from Hanoi, Bill saw his sister Ann as a psychopath, as someone who thrived by exploiting the vulnerable, and so the best way to deal with her was to become invulnerable to her predations. How best to do that? Keep her at arm’s length, or, really, to stay as far away from her as possible. And yes, he’d had the good sense to keep his daughters away from Ann’s malign influences while they grew up.
Until he didn’t.
Until he’d let his guard down. First in Maine, then when Doris left home for NYU.
And Claire saw that capitulation as Bill’s greatest moral failure. His purpose, indeed, his duty as a father required that he protect his children while they were still learning their way, and he’d abdicated that responsibility when it mattered most, just when Doris was taking her last steps into adulthood. She’d never been married and never had children of her own, so she’d never considered that at some point parents simply have to let go. Failure to do so, in Bill’s mind, would lead his children to a life of dependence, either on him or on their mother.
And Claire had been so angry with him that she had at first screened out his latest rantings about taking some kind of Offramp. At least she did until she’d talked to Evelyn about what was now at stake.
It had been Evelyn’s idea to buy Summertime, the Sou’wester 42 in Sausalito, and to take the offramp her father was suggesting, but the idea to meet up with her parents in the middle of nowhere was Bill’s. Again, as she’d grown up on Argos sailing was not that big a deal to her, and because her father had taught her everything about Argos, maintaining a boat of her own did not present insurmountable challenges. And in time Claire had come to see the logic in this kind of escape, because just about any other manner of international travel left lengthy paper trails.
But then Ted called Claire when he couldn’t get in touch with his daughter, and he was worried now as he too had seen signs that people were following him around Naples, and on two occasions he had seen a strange boat cruising by outside his house – in the middle of the night. He was now more than concerned, so he’d called Claire.
Soon it became a matter of coordinating the outlines of the offramp without giving too much away, which had meant Ted visiting Claire a couple of times to set up dates and times.
So one day Bill and Tracy were sitting in the cockpit of their Hinckley enjoying some fresh veggies from the market when a white hulled sister-ship sailed in through the pass and anchored off the village. Tracy had looked at Bill and both had simply smiled, even though Tracy heaved a sigh of relief. Now she had her family by her side so all was right with her world.
After Claire raised the Q flag and customs cleared them, everyone went ashore – and the first thing Claire did was to get down on her knees and kiss the earth, vowing to never step foot on another boat as long as she lived. That lasted about an hour, and after dinner she gladly went back to Moonlight and fell into a deep sleep.
But so too did they all.
And once again the dream came for them, all of them but Ted. They had gathered on Argos the next morning to make plans for the day when Maria, Ted’s new girlfriend, claimed she’d had the weirdest dream during the night, and that she had seen strange things in that night.
“Strange? How so?” Bill asked, but he already knew the answer.
“I was on the boat,” Maria said, pointing at Moonlight, “but it was anchored, well, not here, but it felt so real…so real…and…until this thing appeared. Like a pink fairy, but huge. And the face was off. Really different…”
Claire looked at her, then at Tracy. “You had it too, Tracy?”
Tracy nodded. “Yes. Bill slumping over, everyone rushing out to him…”
Ted suddenly looked upset as he coiled away from Claire and Tracy. “The same dream? Oh, come on! What kind of bullshit is this!”
Claire turned to Bill, then Evelyn. “You both had it again?” she asked.
And both nodded.
“I felt death last night, for the first time,” Bill sighed. “The Pink was sitting by my side again, asking if I was ready. And this time I didn’t try to run away from her question.”
“What happened to you, Dad?” Evelyn asked, now concerned because in her dream all she could see was her father slumping over.
“I was getting cold all over and then I was back in the cockpit falling towards the sea. The same two sailboats far below but getting closer as we fell to earth…”
“And then?” Tracy asked. Ted was looking at Bill as if he’d suddenly sprouted two heads.
“And then…nothing. Just the cold.”
Maria was shaking her head, trying to come to terms with what she was hearing. She was younger than Ted by almost 20 years, but when they met Ted said that ‘something inexplicable had clicked between them.’ He mentioned that he was going on a sailing trip with friends and out of the blue he’d asked her to come along. Ever the empath, Evelyn had accepted her with open arms, but Claire had regarded this stranger warily. They were, after all, trying to keep away from strangers.
Soon everyone had settled at the cockpit table and everyone was staring at the breakfast tacos Tracy had just made, not sure what to say next. “It felt so real, Dad,” Evie said, looking directly at her father, as if looking to him for reassurance. “I was watching you on the boat, which was normal enough, I guess, but then you were in a jet, back in one of those big things you used to fly…”
“I saw that too,” Maria said, shocked by the realization – because she had just met Bill the day before and was now dreaming of him? “You were out over the ocean but coming into land. At night. And I could see the lights of a large city ahead, far ahead in the distance. Then everyone was screaming…”
“You were falling,” Tracy sighed, looking at her husband, “falling towards the ocean. I could see two sailboats below, and the airplane was falling right towards them.”
Claire looked around and nodded, then she’d looked at Ted. “What about you, Ted? Anything?”
He shook his head as he added pineapple salsa to Tracy’s tacos. “I never dream,” he’s said, his voice flat, dull, emotionless, “so I can’t even relate to what y’all are talking about…”
“Never?” Bill asked, incredulous.
But Ted had just shrugged it off. “Maybe I was just wired differently at the factory,” he added ruefully.
“Bill?” his sister asked. “Did you see the boats, too?”
Bill shrugged. “I didn’t see anything, Claire. I just had a dream, remember?” he sighed.
“Uh-huh. What did she say to you?” Claire continued.
Bill had looked down and tried to hide the sudden revulsion he felt. “I guess so, yeah.”
Claire looked around the group, her eyes lingering on Maria as this new member of the group asked the next question. “What happens next?”
And everyone but Ted and Maria looked away, as if no one was willing to even look at Bill, who looked pained as the dream replayed in his mind. Falling, he was always falling, it was so cold. And who was in the two sailboats? Was he leading them all to their doom? Or had they been doomed by his fate?
What had Freud said about falling dreams, Claire asked herself? Falling was the so-called manifest content of a dream, while the latent content, or the symbolic undertones of the dream, represented repressed feelings such as a loss of control or helplessness surrounding life events. Fear of failure, of feeling vulnerable. In other words, everything that everyone in the group had been feeling for months, really since they’d had to come to terms with Ann’s murder. Yet Bill, not Ann and not even Doris had become the locus of their feelings.
But why?
What was Bill to Maria but a stranger? Why had he come to personify their fears?
Then Maria spoke. “Who is that tall, pink creature?”
“Oh, God, I can’t take this anymore…” Bill sighed as he stood and walked forward to the bow. He swung out and hung onto the forestay, his feet on the bow but his body leaning far out over the water, and he was staring straight down into the turquoise water, of course, just as the orca swam by, perhaps ten feet beneath the surface. He watched it swim away, but then it circled back and returned to Argos, slowly turning on its side and coming to a stop directly under him.
“What do you want with me?” he whispered. “Why have you been following me?”
Images of stars filled his mind, vast fields of stars studded with pinkish nebulas.
“What are you telling me?”
More stars, then planets.
“I don’t understand?”
The orca surfaced and cleared his lungs, still resting on its side, motionless but for the comings and goings of the water around him, his deep brown eye focused on the human.
And just then Bill dove off the bow into the water and everyone onboard ran to the lifelines and looked down at him. At Bill and an orca, face to face, side by side, eye to eye.
“What in God’s name…?” Ted sighed, stunned by the sight. “Isn’t that the same one we saw in Southwest Harbor? The markings around the eye sure look the same…?”
“Because it is,” Claire said, her voice tinged with a finality that suddenly felt very out of place.
“How many years ago was that? Almost ten?”
Bill looked like he was in a trance. So too, for that matter, did the orca. Only the differences in size seemed to matter right now, as Bill was absolutely puny compared to this massive animal. Bill’s head looked the size of a melon, while the orca’s was more like a small car; Bill looked naked and alone down there…
…but then the orca swam away, and Bill turned over on his back and simply lay there, afloat, his eyes unblinking, his body inert…
Evelyn and Tracy dove in together and swam to him while Claire went to the boarding ladder amidships and dropped it down along the hull. She and Ted waited there to help, never taking their eyes off Bill, and then helped pull him back up on deck.
And as the group worked they learned that Maria had been an RN, a registered nurse.
A nurse in an oncology center, taking care of patients receiving chemotherapy, at an infusion center. And that was where she had met Ted. Taking care of him while he received chemo.
For a cancer he had largely kept to himself. Especially from his daughter.
And as Tracy received this news, and as she tried to process her father’s mortality, she was covering Bill with a beach towel as echos of his mortality echoed through her mind. Getting his clothes off and drying his skin, the skin she had held onto and loved half her life, she realized she had always assumed Bill would always be there. No his skin felt precious and infinitely fragile, like something to be cherished – cherished while it was still here. When she looked at her father in minute later she spotted the signs she had, perhaps, willfully suppressed. His skin on his fingers now almost hard, his eyes sparkling, yet haunted.
Ignoring Tracy, Maria professionally assessed Bill, at one point holding an eye wide open to check his pupils, yet what she saw made her jump back and scream.
“Look at him!” she cried as she fell into Ted’s arms. “Look in his eyes!” she hissed as she turned away from the sight.
Claire went to her brother’s face and sat beside him, then she looked down. This was something new, she thought, but not totally unexpected. After living with the pinks shaping her life she was used to the unexpected.
But his eyes were full of stars, endless vistas of countless stars, so Claire turned to the orca swimming nearby and went to the rail, reaching down to it, hoping to make contact.
Stars soon filled her eyes too, then the pink creature appeared for a moment and Claire understood that things were coming to an end. Their lives, their deaths, all of it, everything, everywhere. Coming to an end.
How long do we have? she asked.
But the pink creature had already disappeared, and even now the orca was making for the open ocean beyond the pass. She watched it go feeling almost bereft and forlorn, and, for the first time in her life, utterly alone.
+++++
Yet in a way Bill and Tracy had come full circle, even though it had taken them 25 years to get back to where this dream really began. Walking along the boardwalk between the little Papeete Marina and the Place Jacques Chirac, Bill and Tracy stood amongst a group of people gathered there to watch the setting sun, the orange orb silhouetting the jagged spires on Mo’orea, the sky an impossible layering of purples and lavenders above the pink horizon. Lightning flickered in distant clouds somewhere to the north, and the warm breeze caressing them almost tasted of rain.
Tracy had cancer. That was the short version. The longer, more complicated version of her story was that her immediate treatment involved surgery, but then a rather complex regimen of chemotherapy. This might last three months but could possibly continue up to six months, yet the odds were better than ninety percent that her disease would be permanently cured. If, on the other hand, she was in that last ten percent group and the disease returned after the first round of chemo…well, this was something neither wanted to talk about. “PMA, Bill. Gotta keep smiling, even when it hurts!” Tracy kept saying. “Positive Mental Attitude,” she’d add, for emphasis. “Anyone could die,” she liked to add, “but you really gotta want to live!”
But just now, watching her watch this sunset, Bill regarded the simple miracle of her. The shape on her hands, the graceful nature of her smile. The blue color of her eyes, blue flecked with green and gold, the gold an echo of her hair, and as he looked at her he still felt humbled that she had said yes when he asked her out that first time. Back at JFK, right after clearing customs. How had he ever been so lucky? He reached up, caressed the side of her face. “I love you so much,” he sighed as she turned and looked into his eyes.
She nodded, trying to sound reassuring. “Don’t be afraid, Bill. I promise you, I’m not.”
He smiled. “If you’re not, Baby, then I’m not.”
They walked over to the Polyclinique Paofai early the next morning, listened as two oncologists and a surgeon laid out Tracy’s treatment options, because in the end Tracy had decided to stay in Tahiti, and said he Bill understood, or at least he thought he did. Tahiti had become larger than life to Tracy, not merely a place or a destination; the islands had instead become a calling, a type of instinctual yearning, what he now knew was an end in and to themselves. Tracy possessed a yearning to explore, “to see more of this world than time affords the timid,” as she’d put it once, especially when she was on Bill’s case about putting off the journey.
But that didn’t explain her desire to stay here for treatment. Even her oncologists were a little surprised by the decision, and after they left the clinic Bill decided to ask her why she felt so strongly about this place.
“Maybe we’re drawn to the places of our death, Bill. Did you ever think of that?”
“Drawn? To death? I mean, maybe – I’ve heard of people with a death wish, but…”
“Maybe I put that wrong,” she said, stopping him mid-sentence. “But no, well, maybe we’re drawn to the place we’d like to be when we pass…”
Bill nodded as he choked back a rising tide of bile. “I’d like to be in Delmonico’s, in New York, eating a Porterhouse. And I want to face-plant into a bowl of steaming creamed spinach.”
“Asshole.” At least she said that with a smile.
“Hey, I can hope, can’t I?”
“Seriously Bill, is food all you ever think about?”
“Depends on the time of day.” He looked at her as she shook her head and heaved forth a loud sigh, the exact same way she had when the kids got on her last good nerve. “Tracy, look, there was a lot of tension in that office…you could cut it with a knife…and I just wanted to…”
She nodded her understanding, held up a hand to stop him. “Okay, Captain America, I hear you. Still, if you wouldn’t mind talking about things, you know, as they stand right now…”
“As they stand?” he sighed.
“I can’t get that goddamn dream out of my mind, Bill. And you, in that falling airliner, the two boats below…”
He shrugged with his eyes, shook his head as he fought to control the images that were coming to him. “Images of stars,” he said, his voice so quiet she barely heard him.
“Stars? You mean…”
He nodded. “Something to do with that whale…”
“Bill, he’s not a whale.”
He scowled again. “Are you telling me you don’t want to go back to Boston because you want to die here?”
“Why would I go back to Boston, Bill? Seriously? I mean, why did we leave?”
“Okay, okay, but why not Auckland?”
“Why not here, Bill? You don’t like the surgeon?”
“No, it’s not that…”
“Then why? Because she’s not white?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“She went to school in France, Bill. She trained there. She’s qualified. So what’s wrong with that?”
He looked at her, concerned. “Tracy? Are you okay?” She turned away – hiding sudden tears – but he came up from behind and wrapped his arms around her, rocked her gently in his arms as he kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry, babe,” he said as he held onto her. “That was obtuse, even for me.”
“Damn right that was insensitive. Man, Bill, you know…for a sensitive guy you can really be a dickhead…” She began rubbing his forearms, letting him know she accepted his apology, then she turned to face him. “So, you want to go out for breakfast, or go back and cook me breakfast in bed?”
“That place there, right across the street, smells just like heaven. Want to check it out?”
+++++
Tracy had been in the hospital for almost a week. Her white counts were low and her doctors wanted her out of circulation while they transfused her. Infections, they said, could have fatal consequences.
Nearing the end of her first round of chemo, scans had detected enlarged lymph nodes in her lower back, all around her pelvis and spine. There were, her lead oncologist stated emphatically, no overt signs of metastasis – yet. The way she spoke said it all. Tracy’s chemo wasn’t doing the job.
He was walking back to Argos when he saw an airliner on final approach to the airport on the far side of the little harbor, an old TriStar in the blue and white livery of ANA, or All Nippon Airways, only the airlines name had been painted over. The air was rather calm but the pilot was struggling, the aircrafts right wing dipping so low on touchdown that it almost touched the runway, and he shook his head in disgust. Whoever was flying the old bird didn’t know their stuff.
Evie and Claire were waiting for him in the cockpit, and as he climbed onboard he saw they’d laid out a breakfast of croissant and what smelled like a carafe of rich black coffee. Fresh fruit and cheese, too. And yet he still did not feel like eating.
He hadn’t for weeks now. Ever since Tracy began deteriorating as the effects of the chemo tore through her, weakening everything about her – other than her will to endure. He worked on boat-chores, the never ending to-do lists that all sailors put up with to keep their vessels running, or he walked over to the hospital…with his head down and his hands in his pockets.
But that hadn’t kept Evie from trying.
There were a few really good bakeries nearby – this was, after all, France…or a part of it…so bakeries were in the town’s cultural DNA. Once Evie figured out who had the best croissant she figured she’d discovered the secret of life, or at least her father’s life, because he had always been mad about croissant with Nutella and bitter orange marmalade. And, she now understood, it was called French roast for a reason.
Her father smiled as he stepped over the coaming and into the cockpit, and he sat wordlessly and poured coffee from the carafe, cupping his hands around the warmth as he looked down into the deep black within.
“Dad? How is she?”
He shook his head, looked away. Thunderstorms lined the northern horizon, the remnants of a typhoon almost a thousand miles north of the island that was still barreling its way across the Pacific, heading for Guam and Taiwan. “Anything new on the morning weather report?” he asked as he watched lightning flickering in the angry clouds.
Claire looked at him and nodded. “Nothing new. Nothing expected to come this far south.”
He nodded. “How’s Ted?”
“The same.”
Ted’s cancer had never really gone away, but a few weeks after their arrival in Papeete it had come roaring back with a vengeance. And it hadn’t been lost on anyone that both father and daughter were fighting the same devilish foe. Or that just now it seemed that both were losing their war.
But as he sipped his coffee the old TriStar taxied to a rarely used ramp at the airport and an ambulance approached as an old air-stair was pushed in place. The forward door opened and Bill could see medics rush up the stairs, and a few minutes later one of the flight crew emerged and stood out there, arms crossed, face turned into the wind. A few minutes later a gurney appeared, then the medics and firemen helped wrestle it down the stairs. Whoever was on the gurney, he saw, had apparently passed in-flight, as sheets were pulled up over the person’s head. If the captain had passed, he thought, that would account for the crappy landing. An hour later the TriStar was sealed up tight, and, it seemed, not going anywhere. Perhaps its journey was at an end, too.
He finished his coffee then filled the water tanks from the public supply, then he made his rounds. Check battery charge and voltage. Check the bilges for leaks. Then the raw water strainer and the Racors beside the old Westerbeke diesel. Turn on the engine for bit, check the exhaust for the traces of white smoke he’d seen a few days ago. Nothing. Walk the deck, check the standing rigging and their mooring lines, then head downstairs to fill in Argos’ logbook.
He took comfort in such things these days. The minutiae that demonstrated his attention to detail had not slipped from his grasp. Because he was concerned that it might.
He had been depressed before. Not bad, but bad enough. After Doris. When it felt like the whole universe had fallen into an infinite darkness. And Claire had, as she always had, come to his rescue one more time.
“This is situational, Bill. It’s not biochemical. There’s nothing wrong with you, nothing that any other human being would feel in the same circumstance. It’ll pass…”
And it had. Life, he kept telling himself, just goes on and on. What had the ground-pounders said in the Nam? Lead, follow, or get out of the way? Wasn’t that the essence of living? And he’d always been a leader, hadn’t he? Since his third year at Annapolis? In his squadron? Even in the Hanoi Hilton, when Colonel Thao tried to beat him down. Lead by example. Lead when everyone around you is giving up. Because that’s just what you do.
He wasn’t ready for the dream that night.
The TriStar’s systems failing one by one…electrical…hydraulics…the only thing left were the engines and they were responding but when he looked up all he saw was onrushing water, windswept waves and two sailboats filling his view out the windshield before…
And then she was there. The pink creature. Her amber owl’s eyes searching his, probing his reaction to the moment of his death. Even if it was just a dream.
Just a dream.
Just a dream?
What was life but a dream?
‘Is that what you really think?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’
‘Why do you wake up?’
‘Because I’m afraid…?’
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘Death. Not existing. Infinity without awareness. Nothingness.’
‘Do you remember Captain Phelps?’
‘How do you…you mean my ethics prof at Annapolis?’
‘Yes.’
‘How could you possibly know…?’
‘I read your thoughts and experiences as you might a book.’
‘Everything?’
‘Everything of consequence.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Everything chemically encoded into long term memory.’
‘Ah.’
‘During his first lecture you seemed to experience a kind of revelation. Do you remember what that was?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, of course, his thought experiment.’
‘Tell me what you remember.’
‘Imagine the universe, he said to us. The universe in all its infinite glory. Now imagine all that being swept up in a dustpan and put into a suitcase. All of it. Everything. And then imagine snapping your fingers and even that suitcase is gone. Then, he asked us what would remain?’
‘And you raised your hand, did you not? What did you say to him?’
‘I said nothingness cannot exist, or something like that, because nothingness implies observation, and with nothingness there could be no observer.’
‘And what did Professor Phelps say? Do you remember?’
‘He asked us something like: “What if God is the only thing left?” But for that to be true, that would mean that God is nothingness. Therefore everything is nothingness. Even God.’
‘Do you remember how that made you feel?’
‘Empty. Hollowed out and breathless. Like a punch to the gut.’
‘Do you think he was incorrect?’
‘I didn’t then.’
“And now?’
‘I think he was a fool.’
‘So, you do believe in nothingness?’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘My name is of no importance.’
‘That doesn’t feel right to me?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you know everything about me…’
‘No, I don’t. If that was true I would not be here.’
‘Here? But I’m dreaming all this so how can you be – here…?’
In the next instant he was in the water and the orca was next to him, and even in the dark he could feel its deep brown eye regarding him…but now the pink creature was beside him. In the water. And she was still staring at him.
“Is this real enough for you?” she asked, and he heard her voice now, very near, almost intimate. She was, he realized, no longer just a detached series of thoughts in his mind. This was real.
Then the memory, or was it a dream, appeared and he spun around in the water, saw the turquoise waters and dark coral heads from the harbor in the dream, then the two sailboats at anchor and his wife in the Zodiac rushing to him after he slumped over in the cockpit, all of it as real as real could be.
“Where am I?” he asked the pink creature.
“This place? Don’t you know?”
“No, of course I don’t know! I’ve never been here before, so how could I know?”
She regarded him cooly, dispassionately. “This island was called Mangareva. It was not from where you were a moment ago. It was in a place once called the Gambier Island Group.”
“So whoa, wait a minute, are you telling me you’re showing me the future, or the past?”
The pink creature smiled inscrutably, never taking her eyes from his. “No, I am not allowed to do that,” she finally said, then she paused as she experienced his feelings for a moment – before quietly adding: “But he can.” She said that, of course, smiling as she pointed to the orca.
+++++
Walking back from the hospital early one morning, a few days after his encounter with the pink creature, he was hardly able to think. Evie was pressed into his side, crying softly. Her mother was in that 10 percent, the group with a poor response to chemotherapy. There were two new solutions that, after having secured FDA approval, might be available soon, so Tracy’s oncologists remained hopeful.
Claire was waiting for them on Moonlight, and while she had made breakfast for them she appeared agitated as Bill stepped aboard, and she immediately pulled him aside and led him up to the bow. “There’s been a man walking by,” she said anxiously, “and he looks like trouble.”
“Trouble?” he replied. “You mean…?”
She nodded. “Not a local, dressed in a suit, carrying a briefcase. That kind of trouble.”
“Okay,” he said as he looked around the little marina, not sure how seriously to take this. “How’s Ted?”
“The same. On that new laptop of his, writing all the time now.”
“Writing?”
“Instructions to lawyers. That kind of thing. He’s even got email running onboard now.”
“No kidding? I didn’t know he was so tech-savvy…?”
“Are you serious? Bill, he re-wired the nav station just for fun on the way to Hawaii. He’s still improving stuff, and I’ll tell you what…the man knows his stuff.”
Her eyes darted suddenly, and she stepped behind her brother as she stared intently at the stranger – and he appeared to be walking directly towards Moonlight.
“He’s coming, Bill. He’s about twenty yards from us, looking right at you.”
“Still carrying a briefcase?”
“Yes?”
“Which hand?”
“Left.”
Bill turned around slowly and he regarded the stranger carefully, looking for unusual bulges under his sport coat, or perhaps on his belt – but nothing seemed out of the ordinary as he walked up to Moonlight’s stern.
“I say,” the man said, his British accent refined, old school, “is that you, Captain Tennyson?”
“Dawson?” Bill said, surprised to see someone from his days flying to and from Heathrow. “Terrence Dawson? What the devil are you doing here?” He walked back to the stern and extended a hand. “Come aboard. We’re just having breakfast.”
“Oh, bother! Should I come back in an hour?”
“Nonsense. Join us! Tell us some lies that involve bawdy women and scotch whisky…!”
Terrence had a stiff upper lip borne in London’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and he was as Patrician as they came. He’d been flying for BOAC when Bill first met him, and he’d come to Kansas City for his initial and recurrent training over the years, and they’d spent hours together in both the simulator and the classroom. On more than one occasion Bill and Tracy had taken Terrence out to dinner in Boston, and they’d been to the Dawson house in Surrey a few times.
Seeing this, Claire relaxed and went down to the galley to prepare her scrambled eggs, and Evie went down to help.
“Bill, I’ve heard rumors about Tracy. Is she alright?”
He shook his head and they both let it be. “So what on earth are you doing out here?”
“Looking for you, as a matter of fact.”
“Me? Do tell.”
“Well, I’m with Marshall Aerospace…”
“That’s the outfit in Cambridge doing TriStar mods for the RAF, right?”
“Just so, and that old ANA bird parked over there is now the property of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. She was being ferried from Malaysia when the captain passed en route, and the FO just managed to get her down here before skedaddling back to Kuala Lumpur. They sent me out but I learned a few days ago that you were here, taking care of Tracy. Anyway, I thought I’d come and see if I could twist your arm long enough to help me fly that crate back to the UK.”
“Terrence, I’d love to help but…”
“Now before you say no, I’ve got it all planned out. Leave on Friday, we refuel in Miami, arrive at Cambridge late afternoon on Saturday. We can get your return on Air France Sunday afternoon and you’ll be back Tuesday…”
“Terrence…”
“Your medical is still good and believe it or not your still listed as Orbital’s Chief Pilot, so there’s no issue with entry or insurance, and the thing is, Old Boy, that we’re losing tens of thousands of pounds every day that airframe sits here, so I can hand you a decent paycheck for your troubles.”
“How much qualifies as decent these days. Old Boy.”
“How does fifty sound?”
“Pounds, or dollars?”
“Pounds, of course. Are you in?”
“You have an engineer?”
“Two, actually. Both RAF, air engineers they call them. And we’ll have an RAF co-pilot with us for relief. All the other qualified L-10 drivers have been snapped up for this business in Iraq.”
“I can imagine. ATA must be making some serious money right now.”
“Quite. That’s why the MOD snapped up this airframe.”
Claire carried up platters of eggs and croissant and fruit, then still sizzling bacon appeared and the three of them sat around the cockpit table while Evie, Ted, and Marie ate down below. Claire seemed interested in their conversation, but Bill knew better. Any discussion involving airplanes bored her to tears, but as she was standing in for Tracy she played the doting sister.
“Well, what do you say? Are you in?”
Bill shook his head. “I just can’t, Terrence. Not with things as they stand right now.”
Terrence nodded. “And what if I could pay you a hundred?”
“For three days work? You’re joking…”
“Look, Bill, we’re in a bit of a fix. I’m not current, haven’t flown in almost ten years. I can’t take the left seat and, actually, you’re the only available pilot. And Bill, a hundred large doesn’t drop in your lap like this just every day…”
Ted had been listening and he came up the companionway. “Bill, go ahead. I’ll hold down the fort here, so go and make some money.”
Bill looked at Ted, then Terrence. “Well, have you had a good look at her?”
+++++
He walked up the air stairs and into the upper galley, and dropped his overnighter there. He looked around, immediately saw that all the first class seating had been removed, and only five rows of coach seating remained, and those were the over-wing emergency exit rows, and that made sense. The forward galley was a shambles so he could only imagine what the lower level galley looked like. He walked aft, noted that the wall cladding had already been removed just ahead of the aft galley, but the pressure bulkhead behind the heads looked good, with no corrosion visible anywhere he looked.
He heard the RAF engineers working in the lower level galley as he walked up to the cockpit, and Dawson was already in the right seat, arranging his checklists and fiddling with the flight manifest and fuel load out. One of the engineers walked in and nodded to Terrence.
“Ground cart is a go,” the engineer said as took his seat behind Dawson. “You can go ahead and power up the INS. And oh, here’s the inertial reference,” he added, handing over a chit with their latitude and longitude scribbled on it.
A minute later the APU was starting and all four electrical buses came online, so Bill went back down to the ramp and began his walk around.
“Funny how fast it all comes back,” Terrence said as he walked up.
“Who was using this one, Terry?”
“Oh, it went from Eastern to British Airways to ANA to Thai, then back to ANA. They were going to convert it to a cargo hauler but decided not to, and that’s when we picked her up. She just had her C-check and the engines just had their hot sections replaced. Her bones are good, anyway.”
Bill shrugged. “Panel looks in decent shape,” he said as he walked up to the nose gear. “Any word about why the FO had so much trouble landing her?”
Terrence chuckled when he heard that. “The kid had about 300 hours total time and maybe a half hour of instruction before takeoff. I hear the engineer flew of the approach, and he wasn’t exactly qualified, either.”
“Lucky they didn’t break anything…”
“Oh, did you see the landing?”
Bill nodded. “Dreadful. No roll control at all. I wonder why they just didn’t let the plane shoot the approach…?”
“You’d have to assume they knew how to set that up…”
“Neither of them did? Seriously?”
“We were very lucky they didn’t crash.”
Bill stopped and looked up at that, then shook his head. “What happened to their captain?”
Dawson shrugged. “Report lists heart attack, but who knows? But that’s right…I recall that happened to you once?”
“Yes. That was a bad night.” He sighed as he remembered the call from the galley, then diverting to Iceland, then all that drama in Oyster Bay. But then he met Tracy and his whole world changed in a heartbeat, so one life came to an end as another really came together.
“Well, this’ll be a walk in the park.”
Bill smiled as he keyed the mic. “Faa’a Ground, Romeo Alpha One on ramp x-ray-delta one, ready to start one.”
“Romeo Alpha One, clear to start one.”
He worked through the checklists, kind of amazed how it was all coming back. He’d lived so much of his life in this cockpit…it was like muscle memory…everything was engrained in the circuitry of his mind…and the script he recited up here was a language unto itself. A stranger listening to these short, clipped phrases wouldn’t recognize half of what was said, but Terrance spoke the same language they’d learned together two decades ago in a classroom in Kansas and that made all the difference. They had literally roamed the earth after that, like sea captains of old. Athens in the morning. Rome for lunch. Dinner in New York. All in a day’s work.
“Romeo Alpha One, clear to taxi to T1, hold short of the runway for the Air New Zealand 744.”
“Romeo Alpha One, to T1 and hold short.” They watched the heavy on short final to runway 22, then it touched down and its reversers roared as the 747 passed them. Because the airport was so constricted by geography there were no taxiways parallel to the runway, necessitating a long taxi out the runway then a turnaround at the end to point into the wind, and after the heavy passed the tower gave them clearance to taxi out the runway to the turnaround. This was more than a mile away and at 12 miles per it took a while, and the flight engineer working the panel behind Terrence seemed to be humming a tune, apparently already bored.
“Nice day,” Terry said absently, then: “What’s it like living in paradise, Old Boy?”
“I’ll let you know when I get there,” he replied caustically.
“And on a boat, too. Funny, William, but I never took you for the type.”
“They type?”
“Oh, you know, run away to see the world, run drinks under palm trees and all that.”
“You’ve clearly not spent a lot of time on boats,” he sighed.
“Oh? So it wasn’t what you thought it would be?”
“Terry, when has life ever been what you think it would be?”
“Too true.”
As the TriStar approached the turnaround he thought he could see Argos and Moonlight almost dead ahead, and as he used the nose wheel paddle to steer through the turnaround he looked up for a split second and could just see the hospital where Tracy was…
‘Oh, my love…?’ he sighed, an image of her in the tiny room with bags of IVs hanging from the little metal tree…
“Romeo Alpha One, climb to 3000, turn right to zero-four-zero, contact oceanic departure one three five decimal three.”
“Uh, One to three thousand, right to 040, departure on thirty-five-five.”
He changed the frequency and checked in.
“Roger, Romeo Alpha One. Cleared to flight level two one and Victor Airway one-niner-four.”
“One to level 2-1, Victor 194, Romeo Alpha.” He engaged the autopilot, watched the flight director for a moment, then leaned back as the computer took over, massaging their rate of climb to eke out the optimal burn, then he looked at Terrence. “She seems solid enough,” he said, nodding approvingly.
“Lockheed built good ships, William. A shame they quit the business.”
“Last of her kind.”
“So, I’ve been wanting to ask, but why did you quit?”
Bill shrugged. “Tracy wanted to get out and see the world from ground level, and I think once our youngest moved out she thought that, well, this was the time to make it happen.”
“Sorry about all this, William. Truly sorry. Such a vibrant soul. But you’ll be back before you know it.”
Bill smiled. “She is that.” He loved the view from up front, and he always had. Learning with his dad, buzzing rafters on the Colorado as they flew through the Grand Canyon, tearing across the Mojave at almost 200 knits indicated so low they kicked up dust behind the Baron. Flying into Heathrow, looking down at Big Ben through puffy grey clouds at six in the morning, or the amazing green patchwork of fields and forests coming into Frankfurt. And now, nothing but blue. Blue skies and the deep blue sea. He’d cross this patch of the Pacific in a few hours, but not long ago he’d crossed the same ocean and it had taken weeks. Most people, he thought, measured travel through the destinations visited – and rarely the journey itself. Argos had taught him the meaning of both.
“Did anyone load something to eat in the galley?” Terrance asked the engineer.
Yes, they had. In face, they’d picked up some passengers for the trip. Four engineers working on some kind of radar array returning to home, and a dozen or so RAF personnel headed back to their squadron in Oxfordshire, at Brize Norton. With so many aboard they’d had to take on one flight attendant, and with that came complete meal service. “And I had that Italian place by the Hilton pack a picnic basket for us,” Terry added.
There routing took them past Tahuata and then Acapulco, then Veracruz before coming in over the Everglades on their final into MIA. After their mandated rest period they’d fly over Freeport on their way to Bermuda, then pass Cork to their north on the way to Cardiff and Bristol before entering their final routing to Cambridge, just north of London.
But just now, right off their starboard wingtip, were the islands where his father had, for a time, worked. Testing the second generation of atomic warheads, then the first hydrogen bombs. So many people displaced. So much cancer. But these days cancer was everywhere. Not surprising, he said to himself, given the radiation and chemical soup we lived in. He looked to the left, thought he could just make out a couple of boats far below and he remembered the anger he’d felt that night, watching an airliner overhead and then looking at his speed readout on Argos.
“Different means to the same end,” he said aloud.
“What was that?” Terrence asked.
“Oh, nothing. My mind was wandering.”
“I was thinking about that barbecue place in Kansas City,” Dawson added. “What was the same of that place?”
“The old place?”
“Oh yes, that’s the one!”
“Rosedale. Out on Southwest Boulevard.”
“I dream of those ribs, William. And the fried green tomatoes. Outstanding! Nothing like it!”
He smiled, because that’s where he’d taken his dad that time he flew out, ‘that night when I was thinking about quitting.’ His father had his flaws, and they were big ones, but his heart had always been in the right place. At least until it finally gave out on him.
The lights of Acapulco appeared, twinkling like Christmas tree lights in the distance, then Puebla, with the looming lights of Mexico City to their north and Veracruz dead ahead. As they approached Campeche Bay he pulled out the Enroute Charts for the western Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, and began thinking about their approach into Miami. It would be in the middle of the night so few passenger aircraft but tons of trash haulers, or air cargo jets, usually DC-10s and older 747s, so a lot of Heavies in the pattern.
Terry had eaten his way across the Pacific, snacking on carpaccio with shaved Parmesan cheese that stank up the cockpit for hour. Then, of course, Terry had started farting. Gentle little tree frogs at first, but after a pile of lasagna made its way into the mix big rumblers hit, and hit hard. The flight engineer excused himself after a bad one, and Bill had grimaced and looked away.
“Terry? What the fuck is wrong with your gut?”
“Had my gall bladder cut out. Nothing works anymore.”
“Well, something’s working, and it don’t smell right.”
“I know. Sorry.”
A few minutes later the cockpit began to reek of burnt sulphur and limburger cheese, so Bill double checked the AP then got out of his seat and went aft to get the relief pilot to take his place for a while, but when the poor bloke walked in he gagged once and retreated.
“What the foockin’ hell happened in there,” the Irishman cried. “Who took a foockin’ shite on the floor?” He turned and vacated the cockpit, howling in disgust as he retreated. “No foockin’ way, mate. I ain’t goin’ in there with no fookin’ pig!”
Bill sighed as he rummaged through the fridge in the galley until he found some kind of sandwich that looked recently made, so he unwrapped it and took a tentative sniff. He tossed it in the trash then returned to the cockpit.
“Terrence? You can stop now,” he said as he stepped into his seat, but Terry hadn’t answered.
He was holding onto his side, and his forehead was slick with running sweat.
“Terry, where does it hurt?” Bill said. The flight engineer heard the tone in his voice and leaned forward, grimacing as another fart ripped through the cockpit, the smell now beyond putrid.
Terry pointed to the lower right part of his belly and just managed to say: “Sharp. Pain. Intense.”
He turned to the FE then and looked at the kid. “Okay, get someone to give you a hand, then get him in back. Fold up some armrests and lay him out, and see if there’s a first aid kit onboard with a thermometer.
“Right.”
The Irishman came in a few minutes later and took Terry’s seat on the right side. “Whoot’s with Terry? Got any ideas, Mate?”
“My guess is a hot appendix,” Bill said as he checked their position. Now out over the gulf, it was a coin toss between MIA and Corpus Christi, because he sure wasn’t going to take Terry to Cuba.
The FE returned, red-faced and winded. “His temp is 103 on that thermometer. I assume that’s in Fahrenheit?”
“You best hope so, Mate,” the Irishman snarled, “otherwise he’ll sure enough be cooked well-done, and soon, too.”
Bill rolled his eyes. “Man, I’d kill for a can of air-freshener.”
“Yeah, them was stinkin’ up the place, alright.”
An hour out of Miami, still out over the gulf and well north of Cuba, he called TRACON and declared he had a medical emergency onboard and expedited clearance into MIA, and sure enough about ten minutes later a Navy F/A-18 appeared off their right wingtip. That was the norm since 9/11, when all emergencies generated an intercept anywhere near the continental ADIZ.
Key West appeared, then Homestead. The sky was clear, the full moon shimmered off streaks of water in the Everglades.
“Romeo Alpha One, Miami approach, descend and maintain seven thousand, come right to zero-niner-zero and one-niner-zero knots.”
“Descend maintain seven, right 090, and 190 knots for Romeo Alpha One,” Bill repeated, and he entered the new heading in the flight director and the L-1011 began a gentle turn to the right…
He heard a loud thud, then in the next instant the grinding of metal on metal followed by the sound of inrushing air. The Irishman was looking out the right side windshield, his face illuminated by fire. “Half the fookin’ wing is gone!” he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the sounds made by the disintegrating aircraft.
“Fire in three!” he called out, and his co-pilot’s training kicked in. “Come on. Let’s work the problem…”
“Fire three,” the co-pilot answered.
“Okay, I’ve got pitch and yaw but no roll…”
The TriStar began rolling to the right. Ailerons did not respond.
He applied left rudder and the aircraft crabbed, slowly responding until…
More metal tearing away, then the sounds of inrushing silence as the cockpit ripped away from the fuselage. The flight engineer had disappeared and the Irishman was screaming but there was nothing but silence now as his brain began processing the moment.
‘This is it. All that I am, all that I was, is coming to an end.”
He looked around the shrieking remnants of the cockpit and for a moment he could just make out a large segment of the aircraft not so far away, on fire and slowly tumbling in the darkness, then the remnants of a Navy fighter breaking apart into a billowing orange blossom. And so it was, the last thing Bill Tennyson experienced was the sight of two dangling parachutes between clouds, and he wondered if the pilots would be okay as they fell gently to earth, falling like the last flowers of autumn in the moonlight…just before the coming of snow.
Coda
He heard her voice. Far away. Calling his name.
He opened his eyes and realized he’d been napping. He stood, the boat’s steady motion almost reassuring. Something was wrong. A pain in his chest. He shook it off, then went to the head to get the bottle of baby aspirin, but the medicine cabinet above the sink in the head was empty. He went to the galley and opened one of the cabinets behind the refrigerator, but it too was empty. He turned, sat at the chart table and flipped the breakers. Nothing. He turned on the chartplotter and the screen remained black. He stood again and went to the mahogany steps of the companionway ladder and climbed up into the cockpit and Tracy was there, with Claire on the little road perched above the water’s edge.
“That feels better,” he said to no one in particular. Then he looked down at his hands. Age spots everywhere, the texture of his skin looked almost like burnt parchment.
“Dad? Are you okay?”
He turned to the voice, thought he recognized Evelyn yet she had to be about his age, maybe in her fifties, but he nodded even as he slumped back onto the cockpit seat hard by the companionway. He knew what came next. Tracy hopping into the Zodiac then rushing out to him. Evie too. She would be jumping down into the Zodiac tied off Moonlight’s stern, starting the little Yamaha and motoring over…
He sighed deeply, massaged the muscles above his right breast, then leaned back, waiting.
Then she was beside him.
The pink creature.
And she was sitting by his side, then running her fingers through his hair.
“Do you still not want death?” she asked, her voice so sweet and gentle, so understanding. “Even after all you’ve seen and done?”
“No, I want life. I want to live.”
“Why?” she asked.
“What do you mean, ‘Why’?”
She touched his chest and the pain went away, and with the passing he felt strangely different. He looked at his hands and the skin was smooth and supple. His vision seemed better, too, so he sat up and looked around.
The sky was strange. Almost pink along the horizon then turning redder and redder as he looked up, but the sky overhead was dominated by the sight of a vast blue gas giant, ringed like Saturn, its atmosphere roiled like Jupiter’s.
He stood and it felt like his head was in a vice. The air pressure was different. Heavier. He looked around again and Claire and Tracy and Evelyn had disappeared, but this place was different.
He was anchored well offshore, several hundred yards from the water’s edge, but he saw a field of wildflowers and another field that looked like wheat. Beyond that, a long line of trees, and bright lights flashing beyond this forest. To his left…a vast range of snow capped mountains, and when he turned to look behind Argos he saw several small islands. He turned again and looked past the bow to a headland in the distance and it appeared to rise gently above the fields of wheat and wildflowers.
But there was a settlement on the headland, and the buildings looked faintly Japanese, like one of the tightly clustered villages one might have run across in medieval Japan.
Then he heard someone whistling and turned to the sound.
Two men were walking along the shoreline, and a Golden Retriever was running back to them through the field with a stick in it’s mouth. The two walked slowly, obviously deep in conversation, but soon enough one of the men was clapping, then slapping the tops of his thighs as the retriever returned to his side. He watched as the man praised the pup, then took the stick and threw it again, only now both turned and looked at Tennyson on his sailboat. And then they waved. At him.
William Tennyson had not the slightest clue what to do, so he waved at the two strangers.
“Where am I?” he asked the air around him.
“Where you were,” can an unexpected reply.
It was the pink creature again, hovering a few feet above him. He turned his head slightly and looked into her eyes. “I am where I was…was? And just when was that…?”
“None of that matters now,” she said, her eyes smiling, “but you must pay close attention to the world around you.”
“Okay, sure, but why am I here? Did you bring me?”
“I did not.”
“Excuse my stupidity, but if you didn’t, who the hell did?”
She pointed down at the water, to the orca waiting expectantly there. “He did.”
“Hey Bill,” shouted one of the men on the path beside the sea, “come on! Let’s get going!”
He wheeled around to face the voice, now utterly confused. “Who is that?”
“You don’t recognize him?”
“Uh…no…I…oh crap, is that Dad?”
“It is.”
“And that whale brought him here?”
She shrugged.
“Can you at least tell me one thing?”
“If I can.”
“Is this heaven?”
“No.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Afraid?”
“Uh, well, am I dead?”
She laughed gently at the question. “You look alive to me, William.”
He turned to his old man and shook his head, then looked at the creature again, confused. “Is my mom here?”
“No, she was not needed here.”
“Needed? I don’t understand…”
The creature smiled as she bowed, perhaps a little obsequiously. “We saw no reason we you should.”
“Who is that with Dad?”
“Oh, his name was Henry. You have much in common.”
“Did I know him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
His father waved again and seemed to say something…
He turned back to the men on the shoreline and shouted “Sorry! What?”
“Come on, get the lead out! We’ve got work to do.”
He looked around again only to find that the pink creature was gone again. There wasn’t an inflatable tied off the stern and he had no idea what the water temperature was…so how was he supposed to get ashore.
But then the orca swam around to him and it seemed to be waiting for him to make up his mind.
He dove in and found the water refreshingly cool, neither too cold nor too warm, and he tasted it tentatively and thought it less salty than he remembered, and the water hardly burned when it splashed in his eyes. He got his bearings and swam to the orca’s side, then put his face against the orca’s, his ear pressed hard against the smooth black skin. He listened for the longest time, listened as the universe opened up to him, then he turned to his father and smiled.
© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkühnwrites.com | this is a work of fiction, plain and simple, which could mean that the names of the guilty have been changed to protect the innocent. Or not. And yes, this has been but one more part of the TimeShadow sequence, and this sequence of the arc, Book One, will be followed by two more. As always, thanks for coming along and we’ll see you next time.
Adrian Leverkühn Writes 